San Pedro is again ground zero for COVID 19 in Belize - and tonight, health authorities and anxious townspeople are awaiting the test results from 60 samples collected in a first round of contact tracing.
That's after a single positive test from a socially active woman, an expatriate with a prominent name, who was confirmed as positive for COVID 19 on Sunday.
She is case 57, and her contacts range throughout the island, and could even extend to Placencia. More interestingly, she could have contracted it from her husband, who is a major developer on the island.
At a press conference today - the first since March - the Directors of Health Services and the Epidemiology unit told us what is known about case 57, her family and her contacts:
Dr. Russell Manzanero, Epidemiologist, Ministry of Health
"It is a thirty-one year old female. She started with her symptoms from the sixteenth of July with the classic symptoms of COVID as well, sore-throat, fever, cough, chest pain. Two days later she started with chills and then she lost her sense of smell and taste. She referred to feeling fatigued and by the twenty-ninth she was seen again at the health facility and was now swabbed for COVID. We got those results in over the weekend on Sunday. We do know that the individual from San Pedro is an asthmatic, so that is something to take into consideration. However, we are being told that she is isolated at home, she is doing well, she has not been complaining of any shortness of breath or any that would merit her to seek services at the health facility."
"What we have been able to establish with this case is that her immediate family members have all been ill in the past and her common-law has been ill before her. So, that scenario started around the thirteenth and hers started around the sixteenth. So more than likely we need to look at that case scenario and see if there might have been contact there with someone who was initially ill and not her. Both her children as well are being looked at and they are presenting with flu-like symptoms, as a measue we need to swab those individuals as well. In this scenario, there has been a lot of movement around. We do need to highlight that she has been moving around in different parts of the country. So, the kind of work that needs to get done with the healthcare workers and public health inspectors is very extensive that we need to look at each particular case and look at walk through. So for her since she presented mid-July we actually had to go back two weeks as Dr. Manzanero has mentioned and from the beginning of July was when that walk through was started and see what was it that she was doing all those days. We are not only looking at one specific case even though this is a confirmed case we do have other suspected cases as well on San Pedro and other areas in the country as well. There are other individuals who are coming out from San Pedro who have been saying that they have flu-like symptoms. These individuals are being screened as well and they are probably not linked to this specific case. Others might be linked somehow, but we do not know if this is the index case again in San Pedro, because we do know that individuals were having symptoms before hers, so we need to look at that timeline as well."
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