Health Ministry confident we are at a good place for schools to open

The Acting Permanent Secretary for Health Doctor James Fong says there has been a lot of work done with the Ministry of Education in guiding how they can sort out things like hand sanitizers and making sure they are easily accessible as well as ensuring there is COVID-19 safe behaviour in schools.

He says in the scientific world, it is becoming clearly evident that school children do not push the pandemic as much as adults.

Doctor Fong says this is clear evidence that is beginning to articulate itself quite well and it is one of the reasons why they were able to get students back to school.

He says another thing that they have come to understand is that children not getting to school is not good at all for anybody's long term outcomes, both in terms of health and economic outcomes.

Doctor Fong says they are very cognisant of the fact that they need a lot more educated children in order to sustain many of the efforts that are required to raise Fiji's socio-economic level and therefore better the health outcomes.

He says he is very confident that moving forward there will be a lot more lessons learnt but they are at a good place at this point in time to get schools to open.

Doctor Fong says they are confident that even boarding schools will be able to function.

He also said the Health Ministry has accomplished the first part of saving lives from COVID-19 and now wants to focus a lot more on reducing the adverse health impacts of the loss of livelihood.

Doctor Fong says they want to help everybody in engaging safely in gaining their livelihood.

He says the Health Ministry has achieved what they believe is a sufficient level of COVID-19 containment in this country to be able to say that Fiji is COVID-19 contained.

Doctor Fong says the term COVID-19 free is a term they wish to avoid because they believe as long as the pandemic persists no country can ever be COVID-19 free.

He says they can never say that there is no risk, they can only discuss low risk.

Doctor Fong says the health input into border control has been strengthened because of the response during the acute phase and to a large extent there has been a high degree of medical readiness capacity that has been built up especially in terms of their ability to detect cases early, contain those cases and ensure that they reduce the risk of transmission from each case.

He says they have also increased their capacity in terms of clinical management.

Doctor Fong says very recently they have received a donation of 40 extra machines that have been a game-changer in trying to deal with sick people who get COVID-19.

He adds that these machines are called air home machines.

Doctor Fong says these machines are very important in terms of trying to reduce the need for patients to go on ventilators.

He says the other thing that they did during the acute phase was engaged with a lot of non-medical sectors in helping them set up their guidelines that will help break chains of transmission within the community.

Doctor Fong says they have ensured that they at least start discussing in a lot more detail their COVID-19 safe measures.

He says all of this has been achieved through a whole of government approach through the COVID-19 Incident Management Team.

Doctor Fong says one of the key reasons the Health Ministry was successful was because of the whole of government approach during the acute phase.