No continuous increase of infections – health official

“We are seeing a kind of flattening of the infection curve,” said a senior health official, explaining that “a continuous increase of cases is not seen”.

This means that we are not fully under control, but we are not losing control, we can confidently say, the Health Ministry’s Head of the Disaster Preparedness and Response Division, Dr. Hemantha Herath told the Sunday Times on Friday evening.

Thursday’s COVID-19 positive numbers were: 2,584.

Dr. Herath said that we should make sure that the current trend is maintained. Whatever the actions that we have been taking should continue without stopping – not only social distancing and mask wearing, but crucially avoiding gathering together and places which are crowded.

“Overcrowding is the main reason for the spread...probably everybody to a great extent adhered to the health guidelines even during the New Year but gatherings in large numbers were what led to a spread of the disease,” he said.

The image Dr. Herath creates is of hundreds of people gathering in a place, with one person spreading the disease to at least 25 to 30 others, who then return to their villages and homes all over the country. They do not know whether they have been exposed or not. Even if somebody is accidentally found to be positive, nobody will be able to trace the link of the source. This is why everybody is calling it “samaja gatha wela”.

The impact of the current restrictions will be seen in another two weeks. A majority of Thursday’s 2,584 positive patients were the contacts of people already infected and from whom we have taken the samples around the 10th day after exposure. Further, it takes around three days to get the test results, he said, explaining that if somebody becomes positive today, he/she was probably exposed to a positive case 10 to 15 days before. So, if we are controlling the disease today, the effect will be seen after 14 days, after the incubation period.

“Another important thing is that while we are doing contract tracing, we will be able to control the cluster. But we know that there can be others who are asymptomatic spreading the disease without knowing they are infected. These would be people who do not get into the testing net, the ones falling through, however hard the Health Ministry tries to detect all those who are positive,” he said. Vaccination roll-out

When asked about the vaccine rollout plan, Dr. Herath said that even though they have not covered the Western Province fully yet, there is a need to immunize people elsewhere as those areas have become hotspots. This is why some Sinopharm doses have been sent to Galle, Matara and Kurunegala. According to available information, the Kandy district is due to receive a stock of Sputnik V shortly.

Hospital beds

Referring to the current bed capacities, Dr. Herath says: 26,840 beds in both hospital treatment centres (where there are symptomatic patients) and intermediate care centres (where there are asymptomatic patients). The current occupancy is 24,117. Of the 146 ICU beds earmarked for COVID-19 patients, 66 are occupied There are plans to increase the bed capacity by more than 9,000 shortly