The Brazil­ian vari­ant of the COVID-19 virus must have en­tered in­to this coun­try through one of our 200 il­le­gal ports of en­try, Op­po­si­tion Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment Sad­dam Ho­sein has said.

Ho­sein made the state­ment yes­ter­day dur­ing a press con­fer­ence held at the Op­po­si­tion Leader’s Charles Street of­fice in Port-of-Spain.

In a re­sponse to a ques­tion from In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Paul Richards, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh last week told the Up­per House of Par­lia­ment that this coun­try’s first case of the Brazil­ian COVID vari­ant was de­tect­ed in a Venezue­lan mi­grant.

Deyals­ingh, how­ev­er, did not say if the mi­grant en­tered the coun­try il­le­gal­ly.

There have so far been 15 peo­ple who have test­ed pos­i­tive for the Brazil­ian vari­ant.

“The bor­ders have been closed since March last year. That vari­ant stems from South Amer­i­ca. Then how did it come here? It must have en­tered through some il­le­gal port of en­try,” Ho­sein said.

“It will be a low risk for per­sons who re­turn through the le­gal means of en­try be­cause of all of the strin­gent ex­am­i­na­tions and re­quire­ments they will have to meet that there will be a low risk of any in­fec­tion at all but when they come through the il­le­gal bor­ders with­out any test, with­out any quar­an­tine that is how the virus has reached to our shores,” he said.

“If our bor­ders have been closed for 13 months how is it that the P1 vari­ant has got­ten in­to Trinidad and To­ba­go. How?” Ho­sein said.

Ho­sein said the porous bor­ders are putting the coun­try at risk.

“It is a to­tal col­lapse. This gov­ern­ment is putting the lives of our cit­i­zens at risk, putting the busi­ness­es at risk, putting our econ­o­my on the verge of col­lapse be­cause of its in­com­pe­tence to prop­er­ly man­age the bor­ders of Trinidad and To­ba­go,” he said.

Ho­sein said a re­sponse to a Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion re­quest re­ceived last week stat­ed that a to­tal of 21,001 peo­ple ap­plied to the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty re­quest­ing an ex­emp­tion to en­ter the coun­try be­tween March 22, 2020 to Feb­ru­ary 9, 2021.

Six out of every ten of those ap­pli­cants were al­lowed to en­ter the coun­try.

A to­tal of 12,509 were grant­ed an ex­emp­tion dur­ing the pe­ri­od.

“Per­sons whose ap­pli­ca­tions are pend­ing are those per­sons who ap­plied and are fi­nal­is­ing their trav­el arrange­ment. As at Feb­ru­ary 9, 2021 the num­ber of such ap­pli­cants was 9,427,” it stat­ed.

“No na­tion­al or res­i­dent ap­pli­ca­tion was re­ject­ed. All en­tries are man­aged based on avail­able re­sources,” the let­ter from the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty stat­ed.

In ad­di­tion to the is­sues with the Coast Guard man­ning the bor­ders, Ho­sein said the coun­try has had no he­li­copter cov­er­age for at least a week as the con­tracts for pi­lots and tac­ti­cal fly­ing of­fi­cers have not been re­newed as yet.

Ho­sein de­scribed the sit­u­a­tion as “to­tal­ly dis­turb­ing.”

“We are now faced with a gov­ern­ment that has caused our coast guard to not sail and our air guard to not fly,” Ho­sein said.

“We now have a min­istry of na­tion­al in­se­cu­ri­ty,” he said.