One of the two peo­ple who was re­cent­ly di­ag­nosed with the Delta vari­ant of COVID-19 af­ter trav­el­ling in­to T&T, pos­si­bly spent five days in pub­lic cir­cu­la­tion be­fore show­ing symp­toms and test­ing pos­i­tive with the virus.

This was con­firmed by Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram at yes­ter­day’s COVID-19 me­dia con­fer­ence.

Hav­ing ar­rived in the coun­try ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed and with a neg­a­tive PCR test 72 hours be­fore trav­el­ling, Paras­ram said the pas­sen­ger was al­lowed to go home and on­ly got test­ed when he de­vel­oped symp­toms five days lat­er. The pas­sen­ger even­tu­al­ly went to a health cen­tre to get test­ed.

Paras­ram said he and his fam­i­ly were then quar­an­tined pend­ing the re­sults. He said at least three close fam­i­ly mem­bers were al­so placed in quar­an­tine and that they will all be dis­charged when two neg­a­tive tests are re­ceived.

The min­istry has not shed any light on whether the trav­eller spent time in pub­lic places and to what ex­tent he could have trig­gered com­mu­ni­ty spread of the Delta vari­ant.

It is al­so un­clear whether that pa­tient—hav­ing test­ed neg­a­tive be­fore trav­el­ling—came in­to the coun­try with the Delta virus or whether he con­tract­ed it while here from some­one else.

The sec­ond pas­sen­ger, who was al­so ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed and had a neg­a­tive PCR test, came in to work on an off­shore rig.

“One of them came in through the oil and gas stream, which is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. So they have some ad­di­tion­al quar­an­tine when you come in­to the coun­try. Some of them work off­shore so they would have been do­ing some rou­tine test­ing and picked up that par­tic­u­lar case,” Paras­ram said of that pa­tient.

“The per­son had no symp­toms at the time so the per­son was picked up in that re­gard and then sent to us for se­quenc­ing be­cause of the re­cent trav­el, test­ed and we got the re­sults a few weeks lat­er. We would have been able to quar­an­tine all the con­tacts of that in­di­vid­ual, al­though they would have been in quar­an­tine they would have still had con­tacts with­in that site, so it’s about sev­en or eight per­sons, so those per­sons would have been quar­an­tined—all test­ed neg­a­tive and dis­charged,” he said.

De­spite this, the CMO said he still does not see any need for a change in the en­try process.

“If we look at that co­hort, two per­sons pos­i­tive out of 14,222, it means that 99.986 per cent of them did not de­vel­op COVID up­on en­try in­to the coun­try, at least that we are not aware. It is an ex­treme­ly small per­cent­age of peo­ple to change the pol­i­cy for,” he said in giv­ing the fig­ures for the amount of peo­ple who had ar­rived since the bor­ders re­opened on Ju­ly 17.

He said any ad­di­tion­al lay­er of quar­an­tine for ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers would be un­fair to the 99 per cent of trav­ellers who don’t test pos­i­tive af­ter en­try.

He cred­it­ed the large suc­cess of the ex­ist­ing en­try pro­to­col to the pro­vi­sion of a manda­to­ry neg­a­tive PCR test tak­en with­in 72 hours of ar­rival which is suf­fi­cient.

“We have seen a sub­stan­tial de­crease in the num­ber of pos­i­tives we’re pick­ing up (af­ter en­try) once we had that pol­i­cy (neg­a­tive PCR test) in­tro­duced a few months ago. Pri­or to that, we would have al­most as much as 10 per cent of peo­ple com­ing in via repa­tri­a­tion be­ing picked up. With that in place...un­vac­ci­nat­ed (trav­ellers) or not, it has gone down to about one per cent or there­about,” he said.

He re­it­er­at­ed that peo­ple en­ter­ing the coun­try should be ex­tra vig­i­lant over the fol­low­ing two weeks up­on ar­rival and get test­ed as soon as any symp­toms de­vel­op. He said these trav­ellers should al­so try to keep peo­ple they are in con­tact with to a min­i­mum to re­duce the risk of any on­ward trans­mis­sion. 

While the CMO re­ferred to these two cas­es, Trinidad and To­ba­go has so far reg­is­tered six Delta cas­es, all of whom trav­elled in­to this coun­try.

Pub­lic health pol­i­cy spe­cial­ist Dr Man­drek­er Ba­hall al­so agreed with the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer’s as­ser­tion that there was no need to ad­just the en­try pro­to­cols.

“I think the bor­der pol­i­cy is quite ac­cept­able in light of our re­source con­straint and in light of when you’re ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, the chance of spread­ing the dis­ease is much less,” he said.

He said it would be in­fea­si­ble to man­date the ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers al­so quar­an­tine up­on en­try.