Gail Alexan­der

Back to gath­er­ings of 10 and re­duced pub­lic ser­vice num­bers from to­mor­row.

And if COVID-19 cas­es con­tin­ue in­creas­ing, Gov­ern­ment will “take ac­tion” on the up­com­ing Au­gust 10 Gen­er­al Elec­tion.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley gave these di­rec­tions yes­ter­day as he an­nounced re­in­forced mea­sures to deal with a surge of lo­calised COVID cas­es.

This has caused T&T to beat a hasty re­treat back to re­duc­ing num­bers out in the pub­lic—plus it’s now raised ques­tion marks on whether the elec­tion, due in 10 days’ time, would be held due to pub­lic safe­ty.

Spe­cial vot­ing be­gins on Mon­day and con­tin­ues to Au­gust 9.

Row­ley’s lat­est COVID counter-ac­tion came yes­ter­day at a me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s, mo­ments af­ter Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram gave de­tails of the lat­est 31 COVID cas­es, which have brought T&T to­tal to 169. He said there’s been an evo­lu­tion in the epi­dem­ic with a surge of clus­ter in­fec­tions, which in­cludes peo­ple who be­come in­fect­ed at bars.

Row­ley said the change in the num­bers re­cent­ly were much more than T&T had be­come ac­cus­tomed to in the last six to eight weeks. But he said Gov­ern­ment had ex­pect­ed that with the virus, it was like­ly and pos­si­ble to move from hav­ing noth­ing to re­port on cas­es, to hav­ing ad­di­tion­al in­fec­tions.

He said the num­ber of in­fect­ed peo­ple has jumped and T&T’s in a slight­ly dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tion “...Not as the pub­lic might think but our cir­cum­stances have changed a lit­tle bit.” Row­ley said for­tu­nate­ly, the sys­tem was work­ing to deal with the clus­ter sit­u­a­tion but Gov­ern­ment was re­quired to re­duce the pub­lic’s ex­po­sure and move­ment—and if that can be done, it would be key in con­fronting the sit­u­a­tion.

“We have to re­spond now and we’re go­ing to, not through pan­ic for preser­va­tion but to re­duce the amount of con­tact like­ly to hap­pen,” he said.

The first main step will be to roll back the num­ber of peo­ple al­lowed to gath­er—from 25 to 10. The lat­ter was the num­ber al­lowed dur­ing T&T’s lock­down in the first wave of the virus. Pub­lic Health or­di­nances will be changed over the next 24 hours to al­low this to be­gin from 6 am to­mor­row, Row­ley said, adding this will be the fun­da­men­tal re­sponse to re­duc­ing the num­ber of peo­ple ex­posed.

But he said the num­bers of peo­ple at­tend­ing church­es and fu­ner­als and work­ing in­doors with so­cial dis­tanc­ing will re­main un­touched. Peo­ple can at­tend gath­er­ings but should do so in groups of 10, spaced ac­cord­ing to so­cial dis­tanc­ing pro­to­cols.

Al­so, the Pub­lic Ser­vice will be asked to re­duce the num­bers of pub­lic ser­vants out at any one time over the next two weeks. This will be done by use of al­pha­bet­i­cal list­ing or ro­ta­tions. He said that will al­so re­duce the num­bers of peo­ple out by 50 per cent. The same won’t ap­ply to the pri­vate sec­tor. But if it reach­es a sit­u­a­tion where fur­ther re­duc­tion is need­ed and in the pri­vate sec­tor, that will have to be done—but not un­less ab­solute­ly nec­es­sary.

Gov­ern­ment is keep­ing watch on pub­lic trans­port and that may re­quire in­ter­ven­tion if the trend in the next 72 hours in­to next week con­tin­ues.

Gov­ern­ment will al­so keep watch on the SEA ex­am pupils for the next few days as well.

“If this trend con­tin­ues in any sig­nif­i­cant way, next Mon­day or Tues­day, we’ll have to act on the school sys­tem. We’ll keep this un­der ac­tive watch as con­tact trac­ing con­tin­ues,” Row­ley said.

On the planned Sep­tem­ber 1 re­open­ing of schools, he said if there was no SEA there would be no re­sults to have stu­dents en­ter new schools.

Row­ley not­ed the di­rect link found be­tween peo­ple in­fect­ed in bars and restau­rants and said a close watch will be kept on such ar­eas in the next few days.

“Any­time we get fur­ther in­for­ma­tion on this con­tin­u­ing, we’ll act to fur­ther re­duce pub­lic ex­po­sure.”

He said if T&T con­tin­ues to have the same num­bers go­ing for­ward, more dras­tic ac­tion will have to be tak­en.

“We’re pret­ty much in watch mode and to make de­ci­sions if things go in cer­tain di­rec­tions.”