A Min­istry of Health map dis­play­ing the com­mu­ni­ties from which con­firmed COVID-19 cas­es came has al­so re­vealed how easy it is for those per­sons, as well as peo­ple they may have come in­to con­tact with, to spread the virus across the coun­try.

The Ge­o­graph­ic In­for­ma­tion Sys­tem (GIS) map was re­leased by the Min­istry of Health dur­ing a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day and rep­re­sent­ed the first time the min­istry had met the me­dia and pub­lic’s de­mand to pro­vide a lit­tle more in­for­ma­tion on where the cas­es resided so that the pub­lic could be more in­formed so as to take bet­ter pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures to avoid pos­si­ble ex­po­sure.

By last night, the min­istry con­firmed a sixth death and that the cas­es had climbed to 97.

Dur­ing the morn­ing press con­fer­ence, Paras­ram pre­sent­ed two maps. The first high­light­ed ar­eas where lab­o­ra­to­ry-con­firmed COVID-19 cas­es were.

“So if we start with To­ba­go - we see that To­ba­go has two cas­es shown on the map and if you move across to Trinidad, the cas­es start­ing on the north­west, there’s a clus­ter along the East-West cor­ri­dor, that leads fur­ther down to the Ca­roni area, to­wards Cou­va and Ch­agua­nas and then we see it go­ing along the West­ern bor­der all the way down to Pe­nal, Siparia, pass­ing through San Fer­nan­do. There’s a star you can see on the right, on top of the map, which is the clus­ter of...49 cas­es that rep­re­sent the Ba­lan­dra pop­u­la­tion (re­turned from the cruise),” he ex­plained.

The sec­ond map dis­played the move­ment of per­sons and is not yet com­plet­ed, show­ing on­ly 10 of the then 90 con­firmed cas­es of the virus.

“You can see a pri­ma­ry case in the North-West of the coun­try mov­ing all the way down to the South. There is no lim­it to the move­ment that any­one case can have. We are see­ing a dearth of cas­es in the South-East and North-East of the coun­try but let us be clear, any of those cas­es could have moved to a gath­er­ing in any of those ar­eas we are not see­ing an ac­tive case,” he said.

With this in mind, Paras­ram cau­tioned the pub­lic not to let the map low­er their vig­i­lance.

“Let us not use this as a source...for the peo­ple in the un­af­fect­ed ar­eas as shown on the map and don’t be com­pla­cent. We have asked the coun­try to go on a state of lock­down be­cause we don’t know where the hid­den cas­es are go­ing to be.”

In a sub­se­quent tele­phone in­ter­view, Paras­ram said while a sam­ple of the in­com­plete map which fol­lowed the cas­es’ move­ment was dis­played and dis­sem­i­nat­ed yes­ter­day but the ful­ly pop­u­lat­ed map should be re­leased next week.

“I just gave a sam­ple of the da­ta that we have. Once we com­plete­ly pop­u­late the map, maybe what we can do is a run­ning sort of map,” he ex­plained.

“The GIS unit is ac­tu­al­ly try­ing to get all the da­ta to­geth­er from the coun­ties and pop­u­late the map first...it would take a lit­tle while. Cas­es com­ing in every day...we try­ing to get that com­plet­ed by the mid­dle of next week, hope­ful­ly we could get a ful­ly up­dat­ed map.”

Dur­ing his vir­tu­al pre­sen­ta­tion, Paras­ram said the GIS map­ping “has been help­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the trac­ing of con­tacts and trac­ing of cas­es as we progress through this epi­dem­ic.”

He said the sys­tem pro­vides an ev­i­dence-based plat­form to guide the min­istry’s de­ci­sions.

“We are not mak­ing de­ci­sions in an ad-hoc man­ner. We are us­ing tech­nol­o­gy to as­sist us in our pri­ma­ry cas­es, sec­ondary cas­es, ter­tiary cas­es and ac­tu­al­ly learn­ing from them how the cas­es are ac­tu­al­ly be­ing spread, how they are mov­ing about and, al­low­ing us...to strate­gi­cal­ly place and man­age our re­source base which is es­sen­tial to com­bat­ing an epi­dem­ic to en­sure our re­sources aren’t out-stripped,” the CMO ex­plained.