People’s Alliance Leader Sitiveni Rabuka is calling on the Government to place the top priority on the lives of the people and take a risk-based approach that is driven by science and not on self-serving political and economic interests.
Rabuka says he believes that Fiji is now heading towards a third wave which will further worsen once the Omicron variant takes hold on the country.
He says the high transmissibility of Omicron resulted in about 110 countries having the variant within a month since it was first detected on November 24th in South Africa.
Rabuka says scientific data is now revealing that Omicron is more transmissible than the Delta variant and while it may be less severe, its ability to cause severe disease should not be underestimated.
He says given the warning by World Health Organization and Fiji being a vulnerable small island developing state, the highly infectious nature of Omicron carries the real danger of collapsing our already saturated and exhausted health care capacity.
The former Prime Minister is also requesting members of the public to be vigilant, co-operate with the health authorities, follow all COVID protocols, get vaccinated and boosted.
Permanent Secretary for Health Dr James Fong says he is confident that their plans to mitigate this 3rd wave and the potential health impact of any severe adverse weather condition is sufficient.
Dr Fong says however, their ability to scale up these plans in a timely manner will be dictated by the impact of these natural events and will remain challenging.
He further says the need for community-wide support in terms of adherence to COVID Safe measures, instituting measures to deal with the risk of flooding and other impacts of adverse weather conditions, and facilitating ongoing vaccination is urgent and essential.
Dr Fong adds we need our people to develop and inculcate safe COVID habits into their daily living to safely navigate the current pandemic without relying on mandates and rules to do so.
He further says enforcing settings-based measures and enforced rules are just one of many ways to promote a message to build better population-wide COVID safe habits adding that these COVID habits will also protect us from many other debilitating and deadly respiratory infections.
Dr Fong says they would like to avoid population blanket measures such as lockdowns as they have also negatively impacted our communities on other fronts.
He says in their own recent experience, such measures have limited scope in the control of the spread of COVID-19 in Fiji.
He says the overall goal of the Ministry’s COVID-19 pandemic response and recovery is to suppress ongoing community transmission to a level that will minimize hospitalization, severe illness, and deaths as well as minimize severe societal disruption.
Dr Fong says they are prioritizing the promotion of individual COVID safe measures such as vaccination, masking, physical distancing, avoiding crowds and hand hygiene followed by settings-based measures which include social gathering restrictions, indoor capacity restrictions, ventilation and curfew.
He says the immunity that has been built through vaccination and prior infection is evidently having a significant impact in reducing severe disease in this third wave.
The Permanent Secretary says they will continue to work towards suppressing community transmission because they know that even if the proportion of severe cases relative to all cases is less in this third wave, a smaller percentage of severe disease in a larger number of cases will still result in a large number of sick individuals admitted to hospital, which could still overwhelm the health system's capacity to manage.
He says for now they have a window of opportunity to prevent such an occurrence and this will entail adherence to COVID safe measures and having in place measures that ensure that all those vulnerable to severe disease are adequately monitored, tested, retrieved, and effectively managed in a timely manner before their conditions worsen.
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