Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

In the past week, Trinidad and To­ba­go has had five peo­ple who con­tract­ed COVID-19 from an un­known source with­in the coun­try, sprout­ing eight more cas­es through pri­ma­ry con­tacts and forc­ing some busi­ness­es to close for sani­ti­sa­tion ex­er­cis­es, the clo­sure of three schools and the self-quar­an­ti­ning of hun­dreds of peo­ple.

The cur­rent num­ber of cas­es stood at 156 as of last evening.

These lat­est cas­es, ac­cord­ing to the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram, have ush­ered in a new “phase” in T&T’s COVID-19 out­break.

“In light of our re­cent find­ings, re­mem­ber­ing that our last case—116—was on April 20 and our first new lo­cal case was de­tect­ed on the 20th of Ju­ly 2020, this is like­ly to be the start of a new phase of COVID-19 in Trinidad and To­ba­go,” Paras­ram said dur­ing a Min­istry of Health vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

The find­ings he cit­ed came from re­cent con­tact trac­ing con­duct­ed for the five mys­te­ri­ous lo­cal­ly trans­mit­ted cas­es and showed that the source of in­fec­tion for at least one of these lat­est cas­es could have been from in­ter­ac­tions with an il­le­gal im­mi­grant/s.

“We have rea­son to be­lieve that a per­son or per­sons from that group had been in con­tact with in­di­vid­u­als who had re­cent­ly man­aged to cross our bor­ders,” Paras­ram said.

Asked about their suc­cess in find­ing the per­son/s who may be spread­ing the virus, Paras­ram said: “We have been work­ing very close­ly with the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty. We would share what­ev­er in­for­ma­tion we have, bear­ing in mind those per­sons need to be con­tact­ed for the rea­son—we have to ring-fence who­ev­er it is or per­son/per­sons who would have been in con­tact be­cause the plau­si­ble ar­gu­ment is they would have been pos­i­tive pri­or (to com­ing to T&T.”

“It is an area of spread and is a risk to spread­ing to more per­sons in the com­mu­ni­ty.

“We need to find out—through Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and oth­er av­enues—where those per­sons or per­son may be, find that in­di­vid­ual, test, treat and then ring-fence any oth­er con­tacts that may oc­cur.”

De­spite this, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh main­tained that Gov­ern­ment is not con­sid­er­ing any na­tion­al lock­down mea­sures at this time. In­stead, he said they would em­ploy tar­get­ed and strate­gic lock­downs of busi­ness­es and places ex­posed to the virus.

“What we are do­ing now is in keep­ing with pub­lic health mea­sures that have al­ways been a part of our pub­lic health land­scape. What is height­ened now, is we are us­ing it in re­sponse to pos­si­ble COVID out­breaks,” Deyals­ingh said while ref­er­enc­ing pre­vi­ous oc­ca­sions where schools were shut down for oth­er health threats such as foot and mouth dis­ease.

“To con­tin­ue to lock­down a coun­try for­ev­er or for the fore­see­able fu­ture will cre­ate many more prob­lems than we are try­ing to solve.”

Since the mys­te­ri­ous out­break, the min­istry has launched in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the source of the in­fec­tions and the reach of the re­sult­ing spread. It, how­ev­er, main­tains that the coun­try is list­ed as ex­pe­ri­enc­ing “spo­radic trans­mis­sion” of the virus and class the cas­es as “lo­cal­ly trans­mit­ted.”