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We stress that at this time, there are no plans to suspend public gatherings in other parts of the country as there has not been an infection explosion. But health authorities say they are watching and studying one school in Belize City.

Dr. Michael Pitts, Director of Health Services
“We are looking at one St. Catherine’s that we had occasion to visit yesterday and we saw a small cluster of 18 students with flu like illness over yesterday. That was since 3 o’clock yesterday evening and we have sent a team over there yesterday evening and this morning a team is back there to determine. One of the interesting things we want to see is if out of any of those students if any of them are Caye Caulker.”

And while no decision has been taken with SCA, it’s important to note that the general strategy of assessing the spread of the virus has changed. Authorities are no longer trying to precisely quantify how many case son infection there are, because, really, the h1n1 is everywhere and at this point it is still considered a mild flu. Epidemiologist Dr. Ethan Gough explained.

Ethan Gough, Epidemiologist
“We are not trying to count every single case of H1N1 in the country because that is next to impossible at this point because the virus is so widespread by now and I mean globally, that is next to impossible to identify and count every single case. So the strategy that we’re using for surveillance now has changed. We are collecting specimen from all hospitalized cases as well as collecting specimen from up to six cases that are not hospitalized from centennial facilities, Cleopatra White Polyclinic here in Belize City and the Corozal Community Hospital in Corozal.

And by taking specimen from those subsets of respiratory infections in general, then we can look at what the patterns of distribution of H1N1 are in the country to better understand how the virus is behaving in the country but without expending the resources in trying to count every cases because that’s impossible to achieve.”

Dr. Michael Pitts,
“The reality is that H1N1 is a disease that is spread across the world. It is present in the country, it will move from now where we saw the initial wave to a bigger wave where more people are affected and then it will taper down to become an endemic disease. So that is the pattern that is expected.”

There have been 277,607 lab confirmed cases of H1N1 worldwide resulting in 3,205 deaths. 124,219 lab confirmed cases have been recorded in the Americas leading to 2,638 deaths in 22 countries in this hemisphere. Central America ahs reported 91 deaths with Costa Rica reporting 33 deaths, and El Salvador reporting 17. Belize has not recorded any deaths so far.