COVID cases continued to climb Wednesday when another 176 people tested positive out of 1,139 PCR tests carried out in the previous 24 hours.
It brought the number of active cases in the Cayman Islands to a new high of 4,140, one day after active cases had declined, by two, for the first time in more than two months.
Although there are some signs that the current wave of cases may be levelling out, it will take more time for case numbers to fall significantly.
Comparison with Bermuda
Chief Medical Officer Dr. John Lee earlier this month drew parallels to Bermuda, which suffered a deadly spike in COVID cases and hospitalisations earlier this year.
There, it had taken some 10 weeks for figures to improve, he said, citing Bermuda’s chief medical officer.
With a population of 62,000, Bermuda’s case numbers peaked at 1,612 on 25 Sept. In all, it took Bermuda three months to return to below 70 active cases.
“It may take Cayman a bit longer, because we’ve put a lot of measures in place to slow down the spread of it: lateral flow testing, distancing, masks… it’s actually an attempt to slow down the numbers of people that are hitting the hospitals,” Lee said.
Statistics show that Cayman may indeed take longer than Bermuda before active cases drop back to only a few dozen.
A direct comparison with Bermuda indicates that one week after case numbers peaked there, positive tests in Cayman are still rising.
However, hospitalisations on island are, so far, much lower.
Bermuda’s health system saw, at the height of the crisis, almost 60 people hospitalised for COVID-19 with more than a dozen requiring intensive care.
Despite having almost three times the number of positive cases, 28 people were admitted to hospital in Cayman as of Wednesday.
At this stage of the pandemic, Bermuda had already suffered 18 deaths and another 54 COVID-related fatalities followed, even as the number of active cases declined.
In Cayman, two COVID-positive patients who had other underlying health conditions passed away in November.
The different impact of the surge in cases in the two territories is likely due to different demographics and vaccination rates.
Because seniors over 65 are much more susceptible to COVID-19, the actual number of seniors and their vaccination status are two important factors driving hospitalisations.
Bermuda’s share of seniors over the age of 65 is believed to be just under 20%. In Cayman, government estimates that only about 12% to 13% of the population is over 60.
At the same time, local vaccination rates of those over 60 years top 99%.
Still, on Tuesday, Lee warned that many of the hospitalised patients in Cayman were elderly.
The Public Health department’s weekly COVID trends statistics showed that while in the first and second week of November, respectively, only 16 and 17 people over the age of 70 tested positive, that number increased to 27 in the third week of the month.
In other respects, the weekly COVID statistics have been very consistent.
About two-thirds of positive cases in Cayman and more than 80% of hospitalised patients are unvaccinated. The average age of COVID-positives is 31 and between a quarter to a third of cases are under the age of 18.
The weekly daily average of cases, while still at a high level, dropped to 153 last week from 178 and 202, respectively, in the first and second week of November.
The share of COVID tests that are positive also appears to have peaked at about 16.6% during the past three weeks.
The picture is already dramatically better in the Sister Islands, where active COVID cases have dropped from a high of 86 on 5 Nov. to just 14 as of Wednesday.
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