PRESIDENT of the Guyana-Cuba Solidarity Movement (GCSM), Halim Khan, is calling on the healthcare authorities to invite Cuban medical professionals to Guyana to assist with the fight against COVID-19.
According to Khan, on Saturday, March 21, Jamaica welcomed the Cuban medical professionals to their island to assist with COVID-19. He explained that Guyana and Cuba established diplomatic relations on December 8, 1972 and the cordial relations between the two countries have always been beneficial.
Khan said the team in Jamaica comprised 90 nurses, specializing in critical care, emergency, medical-surgical and primary care, along with 46 doctors, who are internists and haematologists, and four therapists. In keeping with the Jamaican government’s current regulations for travel, the entire team was quarantined for 14 days before being deployed across hospitals islandwide.
The GCSM President noted that Cuba has more than 29,000 medical professionals practising in 59 countries. It also sends thousands of doctors to work, free of charge, in low-income countries in Latin America and Africa.
“Now, the island nation is sending medical teams around the globe to help with the coronavirus response. As health care systems around the world are strained to the point of collapse, Cuban health care brigades have been invited to assist medical workers in Italy, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Suriname, Jamaica and Grenada,” Khan said.
He explained that after the first cases of coronavirus were discovered in Cuba on March 11th in three Italian tourists visiting the colonial city of Trinidad, thousands of Cuban health workers, including medical students, were sent by the government to go door to door across the island to search for people suffering from respiratory illness that could be the coronavirus.
Khan said soon all the government resources were focused on the pandemic. Currently, Cuba has 57 confirmed cases with 1,479 other people who are hospitalized and being monitored for symptoms of the coronavirus.
Earlier this month, Khan said the government also took the unusual step of offering help to a British cruiseliner with at least five confirmed coronavirus cases aboard and dozens more people suffering from flu-like symptoms. Several other islands, including the Bahamas and Barbados, had already turned down the cruise ship. “As other countries’ health care systems falter, more Cuban doctors are likely to be on the front lines of the pandemic,” Khan noted.
Jermain Ifill, a 38-year-old former Emergency Medical Technician, on Monday, was the second person to die as a result of COVID 19. He was one of the two Coronavirus patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
Guyana had confirmed its first imported case of the novel Coronavirus in Georgetown on Wednesday, March 11, 2020. That patient, a 52-year-old Guyanese woman who had travelled from the United States of America to Guyana on March 5, 2020, was presented to the public health system on March 10. She died at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation the following day. The WHO believes that the best way to prevent and slow down transmission is to be well-informed about the COVID-19 virus, the disease it causes and how it spreads.
