Doctor Ravi Naidu who is an Internal Medicine Physician with special interest in infectious diseases at the CWM Hospital says the new Delta variant of the Coronavirus is spreading rapidly and the death rate is expected to increase because of this.
While speaking on Fiji National University's Explain the Science program, Dr Naidu says the mortality rate at the moment is around two percent.
He says the most common type of complications they are seeing in hospitals are respiratory complications where people face difficulty in breathing and need oxygen, as well as heart complications where a patient starts having issues with their heartbeat or suffers damages to the heart.
Dr Naidu says another complication is blood clotting which can lead to death.
He also says they are witnessing another issue coming up around the world known as "long COVID" where people are suffering from long term complications almost a year after testing positive for the virus.
He says there are some people whose thinking capacity has been affected and their brain is not functioning like it used to in the past.
He adds people who are most vulnerable to this are the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions.
Dr Naidu also says that studies show that almost 90% of the people who are fully vaccinated do not get COVID-19.
He says the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine has been determined after studies conducted on a larger number of people and not just one individual.
Dr Naidu says a lot of people have this misconception about the vaccine.
He says for example if a hundred people get vaccinated, then around 90 of them will not get COVID and the ones who do will not get a severe form of sickness.
