Photo: Dr. Fernando Cuellar, internal medical specialist
by Charles Gladden
BELIZE CITY, Mon. Oct. 31, 2022
Members of the Belize Medical Dental Association (BMDA) convened on Friday, October 28, at the BMDA’s 39th Annual Congress, a two-day event which was held at the Best Western Biltmore Plaza under the theme “Improving and Standardizing the Quality of Healthcare in a Post-Pandemic Era.”
At the event, medical professionals took an analytical look at how the country’s healthcare system functioned, and the challenges faced and lessons learned, during the two-year period within which the COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak.
One of the presenters at the event was Dr. Fernando Cuellar, an internal medical specialist, who focused on what medical officials have learned from the COVID pandemic and how to prepare for any future health crises.
“The truth of the matter is that we’re not quite sure yet. We haven’t done a thorough formal post-mortem of what has happened through the pandemic. We have different opinions, and we have different anecdotal responses, but I have encouraged my colleagues and the ministry, and the authorities to do a formal post-mortem, and even if it takes us a year or two years so that we can say we did this right and this was totally wrong and we can prepare ourselves for the next go around, because there will be a next go around, unfortunately, and in the next 20 years or 30 years, then we should put ourselves in a position where we are better prepared,” said Dr. Cuellar.
He went on to point out, “… Definitely, we need to give much more emphasis to public health professionals in epidemiology, the drivers, the lab technicians, the lab workers, the nursing, and a lot of support people that played a big role and helped us to get through it as well as we did …” He then referred to the 682 deaths caused by the Covid-19 virus and remarked, “… we need to look at it properly so that we could see if those amount of deaths were avoidable or if we can do better next time.”
Cuellar also noted that although there are relatively few Covid-19 cases currently, there has not yet been an official declaration of the end of the pandemic hy WHO. “We have to wait until an official declaration of the end of the pandemic, and we’ve only relied on one international body, which is WHO, who will formally do that. But we are close to that, both on a local level, and on a global level. We are close to that. We will have to go from pandemia to endemia, meaning that we will have it with us all the time in just the same way that we have dengue with us all the time, chikungunya, and those other transmissible illnesses. So, we’re going to use different terminologies. We will still have COVID, but not in the large numbers and the mortality associated with them,” he said.