WITH deaths that occurred in 2021 just now being confirmed as COVID-19-related, Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton is reporting that the delay was due to the thorough interrogation process which takes place to determine if a death was linked to the virus.

According to the Ministry of Health and Wellness’s weekly COVID-19 bulletin for this year, eight deaths said to have occurred in 2021 were confirmed as COVID-19 related between July 30 and August 5, 2024.

Meanwhile, an additional 15 deaths said to have occurred in 2021 were officially confirmed as COVID-19-related between August 6 and August 12, 2024. Three deaths which occurred in either 2021 or 2022 were also confirmed between August 13 and 19 of this year.

“Sometimes what happens is that people die from complications of COVID — so it might be pneumonia, it might be other things — so it’s just a matter of the length of time it has taken to interrogate the particular case; it’s not intended to hide the information. Sometimes it might take a little long but that’s just how the process works, unfortunately,” he told the Jamaica Observer last week.

“Some of the deaths required further investigation. The information comes out of the regions, which comes from the hospitals, and sometimes some of the interrogations around cause of death require convening expert panel discussions and so on,” said Tufton.

“The programme has been to interrogate, get the expert panel, review, look at the cause of death, what may have led to that cause, and then a determination is made,” he explained.

According to the Ministry of Health, a total of 3,840 COVID-19-related deaths have been confirmed as of August 19 this year. However, 166 deaths remain under investigation and could increase the death toll.

As of August 8 there have been 13 COVID-19 deaths reported this year.

Dr Tufton told the Observer he is uncertain when the backlog of deaths under investigation from previous years would be cleared.

“I will enquire, but I suspect that each death has to be taken as a particular case — so it depends on a lot of things,” he said.

World Health Organization (WHO) ended the global emergency status for COVID-19 last year, more than three years after its original declaration. However, cases continue to fluctuate in countries across the globe such as the United States, which has reported multiple spikes in cases.

Jamaica’s health ministry last month, reporting a high transmission of the virus among the population, urged citizens to remain vigilant.

The ministry, in a press release, stated that in July the country saw a 16 per cent increase in COVID-19 cases with figures jumping from 152 the previous month to 176. The case distribution showed the parishes of Kingston and St Andrew (25 per cent), St Catherine (18 per cent), and St James (18 per cent) with the highest figures.

In response to the figures, Minister Tufton said it was never envisioned that the virus would completely go away.

“When the pandemic was declared ended by the WHO it was clear — and we made it clear — that COVID was going to become commonplace in that we would have spikes, peaks, and drops depending on the environment. And what we are experiencing now is an increase in numbers and some of [which is] not detected,” said Tufton.

“Where symptoms are severe, people turn up at hospitals and they are checked; and then some of it is even compounded by the flu, or even dengue, or so on,” he told the Observer.

He advised citizens to wear a mask when they feel they are threatened with exposure to the virus and to sanitise as often as needed, noting that hospitals are seeing an increasing demand for services due to other illnesses.

“We have been having some increasing demands on some of our hospitals. You would have heard the University Hospital of the West Indies and others claiming long waits for bed space. A lot of those are as a result of chronic illnesses turning up uncontrolled diabetes, hypertension, and some of the complications from things like COVID, so those have been contributing a lot to a kind of high demand at the accidents and emergencies [departments], and some of those [individuals] being required [for] admissions into hospitals,” he explained.

“We treat them as they occur, and in some instances we try to re-route them to other institutions. Sometimes we have to wait for a bed, as you know, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get treated while they are waiting,” said Tufton.