Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

With­in four days, the coun­try has de­tect­ed three lo­cal­ly trans­mit­ted cas­es of COVID-19 with un­known ori­gins.

In its 10 am up­date on Fri­day, the Min­istry of Health con­firmed that the lat­est case, num­ber 142, was “pend­ing epi­demi­o­log­i­cal in­ves­ti­ga­tion.”

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that the pa­tient is a 63-year-old woman of Sad­dle Road, Mar­aval.

Calls to the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram for clar­i­fi­ca­tion on the con­tact trac­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the lat­est pa­tient went unan­swered yes­ter­day.

The first case of such na­ture this week was case num­ber 139, an­oth­er el­der­ly woman, which was con­firmed by the min­istry on Tues­day. Case 139’s ac­tiv­i­ty forced the clo­sure of two Pen­ny­wise branch­es in Port-of-Spain and gro­ceries and oth­er busi­ness in San Juan for sani­ti­sa­tion.

The sec­ond such case was num­ber 141, a young girl, which was con­firmed on Wednes­day evening. The child was the daugh­ter of a Re­pub­lic Bank West Mall branch em­ploy­ee and the bank was forced to close its doors there for sani­ti­sa­tion.

The min­istry has launched in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the ori­gins of the in­fec­tions and to trace and test the con­tacts of cas­es 139 and 141.

Paras­ram stat­ed in Thurs­day’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence that there would be no change to the coun­try’s trans­mis­sion clas­si­fi­ca­tion yet and the min­istry would term it as “lo­cal trans­mis­sion.”

Both the Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh and Paras­ram have con­tin­ued to re­it­er­ate the im­por­tance of ad­her­ing to the pub­lic health mea­sures.

Mean­while, Deyals­ingh yes­ter­day re­vealed in a tweet that his daugh­ter and son-in-law test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 dur­ing the height of T&T’s fight with the pan­dem­ic ear­li­er this year. He gave the in­for­ma­tion as he re­port­ed­ly re­spond­ed to crit­i­cisms that Gov­ern­ment was ne­glect­ing na­tion­als strand­ed abroad.

“COVID-19 has af­fect­ed us all. Sad­ly it hit my fam­i­ly. At the height of T&T’s COVID re­sponse when there were dai­ly med­ical brief­in­gs. My wife and I got some sad news. We found out that my daugh­ter and her hus­band, who re­side in Eng­land, both got COVID. No one knew this at the time. We were very scared. But I did not miss a day’s work as your MP or as your Min­is­ter of Health. It was not easy but, my com­mit­ment was to keep the cit­i­zens of Trinidad and To­ba­go safe,” he said.

“So when you hear per­sons say that the PNM gov­ern­ment doesn’t care about our cit­i­zens abroad. THEY ARE WRONG! COVID-19 has af­fect­ed us all. It is my com­mit­ment and the com­mit­ment of this PNM gov­ern­ment to keep the coun­try safe now and af­ter Au­gust 10.”

Deyals­ingh did not, how­ev­er, say whether his daugh­ter and son-in-law had since re­cov­ered from the virus.