Unvaccinated, partially vaccinated lead spike in COVID hospitalisations

The majority of people who have been hospitalised with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, according to health officials.

In Public Health’s weekly COVID-19 situation report, as of Saturday, 15 Jan., there had been 158 COVID patients admitted to hospital since the start of the epidemic in March 2020. Of the 130 patients whose vaccination statuses are known, 98, or 75%, were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.

As of Thursday, 17 patients were in hospital with COVID-19 – five at Health City and 12 at the Cayman Islands Hospital.

Interim Chief Medical Officer Dr. Autilia Newton, speaking at a government press briefing on Thursday, said vaccinated people who were in hospital had other underlying conditions which were fuelling their need for medical care.

She said there had been a slight increase in hospitalisations in the last few days, but added that the rise was “not been extremely dramatic or anything like that”.

“What we continue to see is that the majority of people who end up in hospital are the ones who are either unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, and this is why the key message is so important, that you get your double vaccination and then you get your booster,” she said.

Explaining what she has been seeing with the local hospitalisations, Newton said cases with fully vaccinated and partially vaccinated people usually involved “extremely vulnerable” individuals with other diseases.

“So clearly, for those people, just the two doses of vaccines are not enough to protect. We are monitoring the situation very carefully … and we want to put now a lot of efforts in rebooting our booster campaign because that is what is going to give us a bit more reassurance that people are protected, and we can prevent hospital admissions,” she said.

Fully vaccinated is defined has having two shots of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Among the 17 people in hospital are two new in-patients, one of whom is Education Minister Juliana O’Connor-Connolly, who was airlifted from Faith Hospital on Cayman Brac to the Cayman Islands hospital in George Town Thursday afternoon.

She tested positive over the weekend.

Premier Wayne Panton, speaking on government station Radio Cayman Friday morning, said, O’Connor-Connolly had undergone diagnostic testing of her lungs, and she was “doing well”.

He expects her to be “up and about” fairly soon, adding, “I am sure she will bounce back quickly” to rejoin Cabinet next week.

Local Omicron cases showing respiratory symptoms

Newton said patients with the Omicron variant are showing more flu-like symptoms, but “what seems to be less evident are those very two peculiar symptoms, which were so evident with the variants before, like the original one, Alpha, then Delta, which are the loss of smell and taste.”

She said, “Omicron primarily is a respiratory symptom, so people are admitted with shortness of breath, difficulty in breathing, pneumonia. But then, it is a virus that can attack all systems in the body.”

Medical staff are seeing people admitted to intensive care with not just respiratory symptoms, but also with multi-organ failure, as has been the case with previous variants, Newton said.

The milder cases usually involve respiratory issues, and health professionals are also seeing patients with leg pain, muscular pain, fatigue, headaches and sore throats.

Meanwhile, on Thursday night, Public Health reported 850 new positive PCR tests for COVID-19, over the two-day period of 17-18 Jan., with 448 reported on Monday and 402 on Tuesday.

Seven new cases of COVID were reported in the Sister Islands on 17 Jan. and another seven the next day.