Senior Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Anton Best.
Given concerns about community spread in Barbados as it relates to COVID-19, Senior Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Anton Best recently sought to clear up the matter, whilst outlining the various transmission categories for the virus, as outlined by the WHO.
He explained that according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), a country can have no cases, sporadic cases, clusters of cases or community transmission.
“The World Health Organisation has categories for describing a COVID epidemic in a particular country or jurisdiction or community. So there are four categories for the description of COVID-19 and those categories are; one, no cases and that’s self explanatory; two, sporadic cases and sporadic cases refer to a small number of cases, one or more that may be imported or detected locally. So understand that with the origin of COVID-19, being Wuhan China, it had to be exported so to speak, where persons with the disease would have left China, Wuhan China and went to other places. So when a person who has COVID comes into a country, that’s considered an imported case, and that’s how the disease is spread from one country to another or from one city to another,” Best explained.
He added, “When we talk about clusters of cases, clusters refer to cases that are linked to each other, either in time, geographical location or by common exposure. It also refers to larger outbreaks of local transmission, including big numbers of cases not linked to transmission chains or multiple unrelated events.
“Now, the final and fourth category of describing a COVID epidemic is community transmission or community spread and this is not the same thing as local transmission. So I would have explained to you that when you get an imported case, then local transmission happens after your cases start being imported, so to speak, and you have transmission in a particular geographical area, from one person to another. What we do many times, is unfortunately confuse or conflate the two terms “community spread” or “community transmission” with “local transmission”. So we need to stop that. So local transmission is not the same thing as community transmission,” he stressed.
“So when we talk about local transmission, we’re talking about one case to another in Barbados. So when you detect a case and you can explain that case, being exposed to another person, that is local transmission. When we talk about community transmission, it means that you have multiple cases where you cannot explain how this person got COVID-19 (and) there’s no set number, the definition according to the World Health Organisation is a large number,” the Senior Medical Officer revealed.