Haiti detects cases of the British and Brazilian variants of coronavirus

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Haiti detected, “in a small number of patients,” the British and Brazilian variants of the coronavirus, reported Friday Lauré Adrien, director-general of the Ministry of Public Health.

“Yes, it is true. This is not something we found randomly. This is an active investigation by our laboratory networks based on samples from confirmed positive cases in the country,” Adrien told RTVC radio station.

As Haiti does not have the capacity to perform sequencing and thus be able to identify what type of virus it is specifically, “we are still in the habit of regularly sending samples to be retested in laboratories abroad,” he said.

“Unfortunately, this week, a little less than 48 hours ago, the results that have reached us report the identification of the Brazilian and English variant in a small number of patients,” specified the director-general of the Ministry of Public Health, who added that it is “important” to focus on the infections of the youngest.

In other statements to the press, the official informed that “for several weeks now, especially since the beginning of May, we have observed an increase in the number of cases”.

According to Lauré Adrien, “this is not yet a cause for concern. As much as the virus is circulating in the population, we knew that the more tests are carried out, the greater the risk of an increase in the number of cases”.

What is a cause for concern is the increase in hospitalizations, he admitted, which is why he asked the population to adopt individual protective measures that could limit the spread of the virus.

“To this,” he added, should be added, “a collective measure which is vaccination.”

The Caribbean country has been relatively unaffected by the coronavirus, with 13,305 infections and 271 deaths.

Although the statistics do not reflect the true magnitude of the pandemic in Haiti, due to the limited detection capacity of the virus, covid-19 has not caused the collapse of health services.

Haiti is one of the 4 countries in the world that has not started vaccinating against covid-19. Still, its government declined the AstraZeneca vaccine for fear that the population would reject it after the cases of thrombi detected in Europe, official sources told Efe.

Haiti is one of the 92 low-income countries that have obtained access to the covid-19 vaccine through the World Health Organization’s Covax mechanism, which, like the rest of the participating countries, assigned the Caribbean nation several doses to vaccinate 20% of its population by the end of 2021.

In the first round of Covax vaccine allocation, Haiti had been allocated 756,000 doses manufactured by the Serum Institute of India under license from AstraZeneca.