ST GEORGE’S, Grenada, CMC – Executive Director of the Trinidad-based Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), Dr Joy St John, on Thursday said that several coronavirus (COVID-19) variants that are causing surges in the United States, the United Kingdom and China have “been circulating in the Caribbean since last year”.

But Dr St John urged regional countries against shutting down their borders or implementing travel restrictions as a means of curbing the spread of the virus.

Speaking at the latest edition of the virtual series on “Global Health Reporting Initiative: Vaccines and Immunisation in the Caribbean,” organised by the Jamaica-based Media Institute of the Caribbean, the CARPHA official said the agency is working with member states in dealing with the situation.

“We have not been seeing the surges that are (affecting) the rest of the world. We have seen surges, as I said, before linked to other viruses, like the RSV, influenzas H2 and three. And so we are scientifically unjustified in trying to stop any particular country from coming to the region because we feared the various COVID variants,” she said, adding “we are not seeing the level of illness that we saw when Delta was circulating rapidly in great numbers.

“I have to tell you that we are detecting some cases of Delta sporadically across the region,” she told the participants, adding that it was important for people in the region to be vaccinated or receive their booster shots to curb the spread of the virus.

“I hope I have explained to you the importance of knowing your region. The Caribbean region is not in a state where we need to be going back to any draconian measures,” she added.

The CARPHA official said there have been several articles relating to what’s taking place in China, which has had a “very draconian measure on the general population” and had eased up last month.

She said coinciding with the increase in travel “we have seen mild, severe disease, hospitalisation and the official reports signal deaths. There are reports as well that some countries think the number of deaths reported by China are underestimated”.

She said she wanted the participants to realise that once you open up your borders “you are going to be open to other respiratory diseases and, in fact, the Caribbean in the latter half of 2022, especially in the final quarter…what we saw in terms of severe disease, hospitalisations and some deaths was other respiratory viruses, not COVID-19 so much.

“Yes, we saw some COVID-19 illness but not like before, not like during Delta, but we saw issues with RSV, we saw issues with influenza, issues with H2 and three commonly known as Bird Flu…across the Caribbean.

CARPHA is the single regional public health agency for the Caribbean, legally established in July 2011 by an Inter-Governmental Agreement signed by Caribbean Community (Caricom) countries.

The agency rationalises public health arrangements in the region by combining the functions of five Caribbean Regional Health Institutes (RHIs) into a single agency.

Dr St John told the panel discussion that the issue of misinformation was still a major problem for the region, with those engaged in the practice becoming much more sophisticated.

“We have got this serious misinformation,” she said, sharing with the participants “an event that actually came out of PAHO’s (Pan American Health Organization) Whatsapp group.

“We have our CMOs (chief medical officers) joined in a Whatsapp group and several of them at the same time reported that there were these videos with very damaging suggestions…and purporting to be a PAHO product.

“So we reported this to PAHO (and)…so the vaccine misinformation has gotten extremely sophisticated in terms of how it is presented, not only the type of information, but the latest one I have seen circulating with several Caribbean ministries of health have denounced as coming from them…mixes a lot of factual information with conjecture as scare tactics”.

In her presentation, Dr St John urged the region to ensure that their citizens are vaccinated, recommending that everyone is up to date with vaccination.

She said if Caribbean countries have access to the newer World Health Organisation (WHO) approved vaccines, CARPHA is recommending to the member states that they should give national approval for these vaccines.