Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh has said that T&T’s par­al­lel health sys­tem has reached its ca­pac­i­ty and for the next few weeks will not be able to take in any new pa­tients for COVID-19 re­lat­ed cas­es.

“Our par­al­lel health sys­tem is ba­si­cal­ly filled at this time and will be filled for the next two weeks be­cause we have over 200 per­sons com­ing in from Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos, oth­er groups. We have quar­an­tined 306 per­sons on the cruise ship. We will not be able to ac­com­mo­date big groups. Let us hope that no one presents with pos­i­tive tests be­cause if we get many pos­i­tive tests it means a fa­cil­i­ty can­not be turned around in two weeks,” he said speak­ing at a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Sat­ur­day.

Dr Maryam Richards, Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer, Min­istry of Health, who was al­so at the press con­fer­ence, ex­plained that the "par­al­lel health sys­tem" was set up to deal specif­i­cal­ly with COVID-19 re­lat­ed cas­es.

She in­di­cat­ed that to date, 616 re­turn­ing na­tion­als and 957 peo­ple in to­tal have been treat­ed un­der the par­al­lel health care sys­tem. On Fri­day, in the space of 12 hours, they fa­cil­i­tat­ed 336 peo­ple. She said the 306 re­turn­ing na­tion­als on the Roy­al Caribbean Cruise was the largest in­take of re­turn­ing na­tion­als since the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic start­ed. 29 T&T na­tion­als re­turned from Venezuela on Fri­day night. Richards al­so said there was an ad­di­tion­al per­son who has gone in­to quar­an­tine at a state-su­per­vised health fa­cil­i­ty but did not give more de­tails.

Richards said the fact this large num­ber of peo­ple are be­ing treat­ed re­flects the high lev­els of ef­fi­cien­cy that the Min­istry of Health is dis­play­ing.

Re­ply­ing to me­dia ques­tions, Deyals­ingh said at this time they are not con­sid­er­ing hav­ing peo­ple quar­an­tined at home as there is no as­sur­ance they will stay at home.

While he said T&T has done well to keep the case count low, he added that the glob­al cas­es are "stag­ger­ing" six months af­ter the first case was reg­is­tered in Chi­na with al­most half a mil­lion deaths. This should be "sober­ing" news for T&T, he said.

He said COVID-19 con­tin­ues to wreak hav­oc on the glob­al and lo­cal econ­o­my.

Mean­while, he said the Min­istry of Health has hired 526 doc­tors and nurs­es and oth­er health­care pro­fes­sion­als some of whom were with­out jobs.

COVID-19 stats in T&T

He al­so gave up­dat­ed COVID-19 re­lat­ed sta­tis­tics:

*The num­ber of tests con­duct­ed has been 3,486

*The num­ber of re­peat tests has been 510

*The num­ber of pos­i­tive cas­es has been 117

*Eight deaths have been con­firmed so far