Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Four more peo­ple have died of com­pli­ca­tions re­lat­ed to COVID-19, as con­firmed by the Min­istry of Health yes­ter­day.

The num­ber of deaths in Trinidad and To­ba­go now stands at 43, with 35 of those oc­cur­ring in the last four weeks—21 since the month of Sep­tem­ber be­gan.

The re­cent fa­tal­i­ties were de­scribed by the Health Min­istry as two el­der­ly males and two adult males. Three of them had co-mor­bidi­ties.

Wednes­day was the on­ly day for the month so far that at least one death was not record­ed.

A to­tal of 2,698 peo­ple have now test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus lo­cal­ly since March 12.

The Min­istry an­nounced 110 cas­es yes­ter­day tak­ing the num­ber of ac­tive cas­es to 1,900.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry’s 10 am up­date, 1,570 pa­tients have been home iso­lat­ed un­der the con­tin­u­ous mon­i­tor­ing of the re­spec­tive Coun­ty Med­ical Of­fi­cer Health (CMOH) of­fices.

Three of yes­ter­day’s con­firmed cas­es were in To­ba­go and six were from those housed at the Po­lice Train­ing Acad­e­my.

On Wednes­day, 87 of the po­lice re­cruits al­so test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus. Speak­ing at the Min­istry of Health’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day when the first batch of pos­i­tive re­cruits was an­nounced, Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor of the Min­istry of Health’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion Dr Av­ery Hinds said: “Forty-three of these per­sons were ac­tu­al­ly in the Po­lice Acad­e­my and there­fore not out and about in­ter­act­ing with the pub­lic be­cause they had al­ready been iden­ti­fied as po­ten­tial­ly hav­ing been ex­posed. They were test­ed and would be processed ac­cord­ing to their clin­i­cal symp­toms and their clin­i­cal re­quire­ments.”

The Min­istry of Health, how­ev­er, not­ed that the re­cent fig­ures are not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a 24-hour in­crease as it in­clud­ed re­sults from sam­ples tak­en as ear­ly as Au­gust 29.

These de­layed fig­ures are the re­sult of a back­log of sam­ples which the min­istry has been try­ing to clear.

While many cit­i­zens are af­fect­ed by this, one Cou­va fam­i­ly was pre­vent­ed from say­ing their fi­nal good­bye’s to a rel­a­tive who died at a vi­ral tent in the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal over two weeks ago.

On Au­gust 22, 53-year-old De­o­dath Nages­sar vis­it­ed the hos­pi­tal to re­ceive treat­ment for an in­jury he re­ceived a week ear­li­er but passed while in the tent.

The body was not re­leased to the fam­i­ly as the pend­ing COVID-19 test re­sult pre­vent­ed an au­top­sy from be­ing done.

How­ev­er, the fam­i­ly re­ceived the neg­a­tive re­sult on Tues­day and the au­top­sy was con­duct­ed on Wednes­day.

He is set to be cre­mat­ed to­day.