Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

As of Thurs­day, there are no ac­tive cas­es of COVID-19 in the coun­try. How­ev­er, while it is a ma­jor mile­stone in the coun­try's his­to­ry, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh once again re­it­er­at­ed that the jour­ney's not yet over.

"I am very hap­py that last pa­tient was able to go home. It's a hap­py day for her, she's back with her fam­i­ly. It's a hap­py day for me. How­ev­er, it's not the end of the jour­ney. This is just one mile­stone in a very long jour­ney," Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh cau­tioned in a tele­phone in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia.

"We are still very con­cerned with the open­ing up of the econ­o­my as we are do­ing it, even though we are do­ing it grad­u­al­ly. We ex­pect that as peo­ple move, the virus that is hid­den all along is go­ing to move," he said.

The Min­is­ter and Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer have fre­quent­ly cau­tioned the pub­lic not to get com­pla­cent as the coun­try takes steps to re­open the econ­o­my in fears of a sec­ond wave of the virus emerg­ing. Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh al­so pre­vi­ous­ly said he fared any sec­ond wave of the in­fec­tion could crip­ple the coun­try's health­care sys­tem.

On Thurs­day, the Min­istry of Health's 10 pm COVID-19 up­date con­firmed that the last pa­tient un­der­go­ing treat­ment for the virus in T&T was dis­charged from the Cau­ra hos­pi­tal.

The last con­firmed case of the virus was record­ed on April 26.

As of 4 pm yes­ter­day, the coun­try's fig­ures stood at 116 con­firmed cas­es, 8 deaths and now- 108 re­cov­ered. The min­istry has al­so sub­mit­ted 2,866 sam­ples for test­ing at the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency and UWI.