Al­though COVID-19 vac­cines have been made avail­able abroad, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says peo­ple re­turn­ing to T&T are still re­quired to do a neg­a­tive Poly­merase Chain Re­ac­tion (PCR) test and un­der­go quar­an­tine. He said the pol­i­cy po­si­tion re­gard­less of an in­di­vid­ual’s im­mu­ni­sa­tion sta­tus has not been changed.

As is the process cur­rent­ly, it is manda­to­ry for peo­ple want­i­ng to re­turn that they pro­duce a neg­a­tive PCR test 72 hours be­fore ar­riv­ing in T&T.

Speak­ing dur­ing the Min­istry of Health’s me­dia brief­ing on Sat­ur­day, Deyals­ingh said the con­ver­sa­tion about the safe­ty and ef­fi­ca­cy of vac­cines be­gan ap­prox­i­mate­ly one month ago.

He said, “What we are do­ing in more de­tail now is that we are start­ing the process of do­ing fo­cus groups to find out what do Trinida­di­ans think about vac­cines, where are they get­ting their in­for­ma­tion from?

“Those fo­cus groups would start around now and con­tin­ue in­to Jan­u­ary. That will in­form us as to how to mount the ed­u­ca­tion­al cam­paign.” He said it would help to shape how they ad­dressed con­cerns by an­ti-vaxxers.

Claim­ing a com­pre­hen­sive strate­gic plan had been de­vel­oped and sub­mit­ted to the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO) last week, the min­is­ter said fo­cus groups would in­clude re­li­gious lead­ers, busi­ness lead­ers, and politi­cians.

Ques­tioned as to what form of proof cit­i­zens would be pre­sent­ed with that they had been vac­ci­nat­ed, Deyals­ingh ex­plained, “We al­ready have a draft of a cer­tifi­cate which we sub­mit­ted to PA­HO and they have ba­si­cal­ly signed off on it. It is go­ing to be a sep­a­rate vac­ci­na­tion record for COVID-19.”

He said coun­tries re­quir­ing an “im­mu­ni­sa­tion pass­port” from peo­ple be­fore en­try would re­quest this.

That ques­tion has not yet been ad­dressed in re­la­tion to en­try in­to T&T as he said a con­crete pol­i­cy was still to be de­vel­oped.

Pressed to say if non-na­tion­als would be el­i­gi­ble to re­ceive the vac­cine, Deyals­ingh said, “The vac­cines will be made avail­able to every hu­man be­ing in T&T un­der Gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy.”

Yes­ter­day’s 4 pm clin­i­cal up­date re­vealed a to­tal of 425 ac­tive cas­es; 123 deaths; 19 new cas­es be­tween 4 pm on Fri­day and 4 pm yes­ter­day; and 26 hos­pi­talised.