Coronavirus: good news as infection curve starts to flatten
THE Covid-19 curve is flattening as the island gets to grips with the virus, the island's Director of Public Health has said.
The fight against coronavirus was going 'as good as could be expected. If anything, it has exceeded expectations', said Dr Nicola Brink.
Dr Brink was buoyed by the positive evidence. 'What has been really encouraging in recent days, what we've seen is that the measures that we have put in place have been highly effective,' she said.
While giving huge credit to islanders for sticking to the social distancing measures, she warned that the island must not lose the gains through complacency.
'We're really starting to see a flattening of the curve.
'The curve that is still going up gradually is the contacts, and we're still actively looking for them.'
With the island's lockdown extension deadline this Saturday, Civil Contingencies Authority chair Gavin St Pier has said they will reveal more details on Friday about what will happen next.
The rate of growth in new cases is currently well below the doubling every two days seen in infection hotspots around the world. It is now every five days or longer.
'What we know is our most rapidly growing category is those that are diagnosed through contact tracing,' said Dr Brink. 'That is really good news for us, not that they have been diagnosed with Covid-19 but these are people at potential risk that we've put into quarantine and, if they become slightly symptomatic, we go ahead and test them.'
Other groups of interest are the travel groups, which are currently going down in numbers due to less travelling in and out of the island.
Community seeding now also comes in at about 12% of cases, and is said by Dr Brink to be flattening as well.
She added that 26 people per 1,000 were now being tested in the island, compared to the UK’s 2.7 per 1,000, 5 per 1,000 in France and 16 per 1,000 in Germany.
'We really do have good testing rates,' said Dr Brink.
'However, there are other small island jurisdictions that also have good testing rates. Luxembourg, although we haven't been able to get a hold of the figures, and we believe Gibraltar is doing well as well.
'Looking at that, I think it just shows that our smallness actually counts in our favour and we're actually able to get our policies going really quickly and act in a very nimble way.'
In terms of exit strategies, she said they were looking at a number of options, including lockdown until a vaccine was available, a model of adaptive immunity, a gradual ease of lockdown, using antibody testing and contact tracing quarantine. However, she said these were still being discussed with more details to come.
Demographics of those who have Covid-19 have also been updated, with the age range from 0 to 99 years old.
Only about 4% of cases are under 18.
The male-female split has seen 62% of cases being female, something Dr Brink attributes to the cases within the care homes.
'We have a female predominance now and we think that is probably related to the two clusters we had in the care homes, as well as the staff that we identified in the care homes as well,' she said.
'Cases by categorisation, we've had a look at in more detail and we've been waiting until we had enough numbers to make some robust analysis because it's not good to analyse on small numbers.
There are now 228 positive cases in the island with 69 people who have recovered and just under 2,000 samples tested.
