COVID-19 Forces Medical Professionals to Rethink Surgery

Dr. Cawich explains that with the advent of COVID-19 last year, it forced many in the medical professionals to rethink their approach to performing surgeries.

Dr. Shamir Cawich

Dr. Shamir Cawich, Professor of Liver and Pancreas Surgery

“When the pandemic hit and I have this here in March 2020 because that’s when the first case in Trinidad & Tobago, where I am, was recorded, but it’s going to be the same for Belize.  When the pandemic hit, things changed significantly.  Surgical practice was turned upside down and what we found out was that there were a lot of work-from-home worker so a lot of people who supported surgery, like the blood banks and the lab technicians were not available and so a lot of our lists were canceled.  There were concerns about people huddling together in our operating room so obviously that would mean more transmission of the COVID virus.  We had a lot of the doctors reassigned and this is understandable because when we perform surgery this is not a very relevant thing in response to the pandemic, it doesn’t help the pandemic very much.  And so when doctors were reassigned to COVID teams, we suddenly found ourselves as surgeons in a position where we were all alone with no help to do operations.  And so, when we realized that this COVID pandemic was with us to stay for months and even more than a year, we realized that things had to change.”