Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram yes­ter­day con­firmed that there is now com­mu­ni­ty spread of COVID-19 in T&T.

He said at yes­ter­day’s me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s, that on­ly on Fri­day that he had rec­om­mend­ed to the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO)—who would there­after in­form the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO)—to list T&T as hav­ing com­mu­ni­ty spread.

Paras­ram ex­plained: “Com­mu­ni­ty be­ing dif­fer­ent from what we had cat­e­go­rized as lo­cal. Com­mu­ni­ty mean­ing that there are a large num­ber of cas­es which are uniden­ti­fied or not linked to a clus­ter.

“We are still see­ing that 50 per cent or 60 per cent of cas­es be­ing linked to clus­ters which is a good sign. How­ev­er, there is a large num­ber of peo­ple com­ing in­to the fa­cil­i­ties, sur­veil­lance wise, that we are pick­ing up, that has not been at least im­me­di­ate­ly linked.”

Epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds ad­mit­ted that in the last week and a half to two weeks there has been “an in­creas­ing pro­por­tion of the per­sons who are com­ing in for sur­veil­lance test­ing, or com­ing in with­out a known or iden­ti­fied link to a pos­i­tive case, turn­ing up as pos­i­tive.”

He urged any­one ex­pe­ri­enc­ing mild or se­vere symp­toms such as short­ness of breath or tight­en­ing of the chest to iso­late and seek im­me­di­ate med­ical at­ten­tion.

Hinds said there is no spe­cif­ic ge­o­graph­ic lo­ca­tion where the ma­jor­i­ty of cas­es are be­ing record­ed.

Com­ment­ing on the fact that the pos­i­tive cas­es that con­tin­ue to emerge are not in keep­ing with re­al-time da­ta, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh ex­plained that while the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) is turn­ing around tests in the nor­mal pe­ri­od there is an is­sue on the end of the Trinidad Pub­lic Health Lab­o­ra­to­ry (TPHL) to ad­min­is­ter the re­sults prompt­ly. He said a lab man­ag­er has been re­lo­cat­ed from the In­sect Vec­tor Di­vi­sion to map the process at the TPHL.

“The prob­lem wasn’t the test­ing, the prob­lem was the re­port­ing of the cas­es,” he said.

Deyals­ingh said by next Fri­day the au­thor­i­ties should have elim­i­nat­ed the back-log wait­ing to be test­ed and re­port­ed on.

He said the NCRHA’s PCR ma­chine will be op­er­a­tional next week and a new al­go­rithm and triage method had been re­quest­ed which will sig­nif­i­cant­ly ease the cur­rent hic­cups.

Deyals­ingh said 48 per­sons were ini­tial­ly con­tract­ed dur­ing the first wave and a fur­ther 25 doc­tors and 50 more nurs­es have been added to the ros­ter to help boost ca­pac­i­ty at the lev­el of the Coun­ty Med­ical Of­fi­cer of Health (CMOH). Meet­ings were sched­uled for to­mor­row with all the CMOH’s to de­ter­mine their needs are.

Pressed to say if any of the re­cent pos­i­tive cas­es orig­i­nat­ed with per­sons who had at­tend­ed meet­ings or walk­a­bouts lead­ing up to the Au­gust 10 gen­er­al elec­tion, Hinds said it was im­pos­si­ble to say as peo­ple have been known to with­hold in­for­ma­tion.

On the is­sue of wear­ing masks and how ef­fec­tive it has been in stem­ming the spread of the virus, he said: “The ac­tu­al feed­back we got from many of the close con­tact sit­u­a­tions when we did ask about mask-wear­ing, we did find that there was lax com­pli­ance with mask-wear­ing in sit­u­a­tions where in­door trans­mis­sion was con­cerned.”