Public Health: stay cautious, keep aware even with reopenings

With the new executive order taking effect this weekend, more businesses, parks and activities are reopening. The Department of Public Health cautions that we should all still be concerned.

"If you open things up, we're probably going to see another surge, that's how these things are patterned," explained Guam's territorial epidemiologist, Dr. Anne Pobutsky, telling it like it is. On The Link this morning, she detailed a troubling comparison of COVID cases between Guam and Hawaii.

"Guam had, as of the 30th of September, so we have almost 2,500 cases in a population of 168,000 or169,000 and 49 deaths, our death rate is 29.1 per 100,000 population," she detailed. "Our case incidence rate up to September 1478, Hawaii is only 874.2 - and we're a lot smaller."

In this new version of PCOR-1, Dr. Pobutsky reminds us, that the pandemic is far from over. "We keep going back this, it really depends on how the community behaves. If we open things up and everybody just says, 'Oh, great the pandemic is over', and goes to bars, or the bars are still closed, okay, they go to church, then they start having fiestas and family gatherings and then we see more and more spread. It really depends on how seriously people take this, there still is virus out there. It's spreading. It's in workplaces. We're seeing it in some congregate settings, there's a lot of household spread."

Dr. Pobutsky encourages the people of Guam to make the right choices to stay home, stay safe and save lives.