THE Government is projecting that as many as 1.1 million people, mainly the elderly with existing health conditions, could be affected should the coronavirus reach Jamaica’s shores.

Minister of Health and Wellness Dr Christopher Tufton made the projections during the National Disaster Risk Management Council’s meeting at Jamaica House, yesterday.

“…We have been doing some modelling to determine if the virus gets here [and] what the likely implications would be in terms of its spread. There is an approach to doing that [as] in public health an epidemiologist looks at the numbers, looks at other countries and looks at their experiences.

Our own experienced Dr [Karen] Webster- Kerr is asked questions later on, if we are uncertain, and then we come up with a model to show what the likely impact would be. The modelling is suggesting that if the virus comes to Jamaica and follows the normal pattern of spread, as we have had in other SARStype or influenza-type occurrences, we could see up to 1.1 to 1.7 million persons in the population being impacted by the virus,” Dr Tufton estimated.

“I hasten to say that some people will have it and it only means drinking some orange juice because the virus does not affect everybody the same way like the common cold. From that, you will have just under 2,000 hospitalisations in year one, and 360 to 400 high dependency or ICU-related admissions; those are persons who would require fairly substantial support. The history of the virus to date shows that members of the older population are the ones who are affected most, and the fatality rate is about 2.6 per cent,” the minister said.

Despite the facilities that have been earmarked as specialised units to deal with COVID-19, Dr Tufton said such facilities would be inadequate to meet the demand.

“Nevertheless, if you look at the capacity of our public health system to deal with high dependency or ICU facilities, that number would mean that we are very short, and so part of the strategy would be to prioritise admission to dedicate wards of hospitals for this particular purpose and essentially for non-essential hospitalisation. We would have to remove or relocate those persons to other makeshift facilities,” he said, adding that a plan is already in place.

According to Dr Tufton, implementation of the plan would cost a little under $2 billion. He said the sub-areas of focus would be planning and coordination.

“…We are hoping that a smaller sub-committee of this group will work with public health [officials] for implementation and closer coordination as this is a fairly big group and everybody is involved nevertheless on a day-to-day basis,” he said. The smaller group, he added, would concentrate on prevention and containment, situation monitoring and assessment, the health system’s response, and communication.

— Racquel Porter