COVID-19 update Seychelles has no current active case of COVID-19 |13 May 2020
• Repatriation flights for stranded patients scheduled by end of this week or beginning of next week
Seychelles has no current active case of COVID-19. But in order to succeed in keeping the situation like this, social distancing is a key element.
This was stated by the Public Health Commissioner, Dr Jude Gedeon, and the chief executive of the Health Care Agency, Dr Danny Louange yesterday during the regular press meet.
Dr Gedeon noted that globally, 4 256 024 cases of COVID-19 have been registered out of which 287 332 deaths have been recorded. 1 527 519 people have recovered.
For Seychelles, “as of May 12, 2020, the country has not registered any new cases of COVID-19. We still have 11 cases and we have done many more tests even on staff and the tests are negative. We are happy to announce our last patient in treatment facility has had his first test negative. Hopefully sometime this week his second test will come out negative. We are seeing a decreasing trend of incidence that is the number of new cases in most countries of Europe. But the outbreak has not slowed down yet in some countries, it is still quite significant in countries like the US, Russia and there are resurgent in some areas like Korea and China. But the number is still quite small. We have to monitor and see how it goes,” stated Dr Gedeon.
“Today I would like to put emphasis on better social distancing. We have to admit that many people are putting a lot of effort and we congratulate them for that. Many organisations have embraced the guidelines and using their energy and we are happy to note that there is the commitment. However we have a group of people who still have not got the message. We will not stop our efforts to continue educate our people about social distancing,” added Dr Gedeon.
“The society has to adopt social distancing as a new way of living. Last week, there have been quite some breaches of public guidelines, such as funeral service, gatherings on the beach and so on. This will not help and the public out there need to understand that the police cannot monitor every single situation and each person is responsible for social distancing.”
Dr Louange confirmed that currently there is only one patient in the isolation centre at Perseverance. “If this patient’s second test is negative, we will confirm that the patient has recovered. The patient has no symptoms and we are monitoring the person twice a day. The patient is currently following the protocols for rehabilitation. There are 74 people in quarantine and among them are four of the people who were tested positive before.”
Resumption of services
Dr Louange noted that the public has been using the health centres very well and there has been an increase in the number of users also. “The public is cooperating very well with us. We also announce that some services that were stopped due to the pandemic are resuming as of this week.
He said the surgeries not related to cancer cases are being introduced slowly, noting that the surgeries for cancer patients were already taking place.
“Our specialists are working on the waiting list and determining the patients on priority basis. We also introduced six specialists clinic that have been opened at Mont Fleuri. All these clinics will operate principally on appointments only in order to maintain social distancing. So at any one time only six people will be allowed in the clinics. We are asking the public to cooperate with us by keeping their appointments. We have noticed that some of the patients come to the hospital before their appointments and they force our staff to accommodate them. The only way we will be able to maintain social distancing is when the patients respect their appointments. We are also introducing slowly our dental services. There will be more measures taken around this and fewer patients will be treated as this service is quite sensitive as we use drill. In between cases, we also need time to clean. This service will work on appointments also. For the time being, those who already have appointments, please keep them and for those whose appointments were cancelled, our staff will call you back.”
Visiting hours
Dr Louange spoke again about the visiting hours at the hospital. “The safety measures we are putting in place need a reduction in visitors at the hospital. The reasoning behind is that already the patients at the hospital are vulnerable and we do not want an infected person to come to the hospital and infect others. Secondly if there is a patient who has been infected, we do not want members of the public to be at risk of being infected. We will allow only three visitors per patient and they will not go at the same time. The visiting hours is still restricted and we maintain it from 2pm to 3pm. We ask members of the public to respect that decision. We know it is quite hard but we ask your cooperation as some members of the public are abusing our staff. We will go a step further by testing the temperature of the visitors.”
Repatriation flight for patients outside Seychelles
Dr Louange also talked about the patients and families stranded outside Seychelles. “We are following these people very closely and we are receiving information from the treating hospitals. They are all doing well and many of them completed their treatments and ready to be discharged. We have 23 people in India and others in Sri Lanka. We also have some people who went on treatments at their own cost and in collaboration with the ambassadors, they are being assisted. There are some people who ran out of fund and the government of Seychelles are helping them out through the embassies. Our plan is to repatriate them and this mission is very delicate. We require permission from India and Air Seychelles and we are following this situation closely.
People who are stranded in India and Sri Lanka should immediately contact the embassies so that they can be helped. A repatriation flight is being scheduled either for the end of this week or beginning of next week.
In the meantime…
While we are not registering any case of COVID-19, what is the update on the frontliners such as the doctors, the laboratory techs, the public health staff and the nurses? Dr Gedeon explained that “many things are happening in the background. Many of them are attending training sessions and they are working closely with the different institutions to assist them in abiding by the guidelines. There are more than 30 guidelines that have been designed and reviewed and distributed in different departments and now we are at the implementation phase. Many of the frontliners are involved in the preparation to beef up the prevention and information systems for the health promotion. This coming Friday we will meet with all the CEOs, principal secretaries and heads of departments to review how their implementation is going. This is the time for us to reinforce our system. This is a war that started and which is not yet over. When there is no fight we seize the opportunities to train our soldiers. Our frontliners are busy doing all of this and no one is taking holidays as we have a lot to do”.
Dr Louange added that the department of health gave some time off to the people who worked in the quarantine/isolation centres as they worked really hard in a scary environment. We salute them for their courage to be in the forefront. We also had two days of debriefing with the frontliners and they were able to express their feelings.
Both doctors said that there are currently different trainings at different level.
At the start of the press conference Dr Gedeon also took the opportunity to wish all nurses and midwives a happy International Nurses Day celebrated yesterday and International Day for the Midwives which was on May 5.
Vidya Gappy
