Gail Alexan­der

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is chair­ing a team of ex­perts—in­clud­ing for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment and Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship fi­nance min­is­ter econ­o­mists Wen­dell Mot­t­ley and Win­ston Dook­er­an—who are draft­ing a re­cov­ery roadmap for Trinidad and To­ba­go fol­low­ing the COVID-19 cri­sis.

And by the end of next week—as the April 30 “Stay-at-Home” end date ap­proach­es—Gov­ern­ment will as­sess how T&T’s fared with virus in­fec­tions in April and will then look in­to May and June to see what may be done fur­ther.

Row­ley an­nounced the de­vel­op­ments at yes­ter­day’s post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s.

While he said he was hap­py to hear that more in­fec­tions weren’t be­ing seen, giv­en what oth­er coun­tries have ex­pe­ri­enced, he said the sit­u­a­tion wasn’t guar­an­teed to show what’s avail­able to Gov­ern­ment be­yond April 30.

“Let’s get clos­er to April 30 and see the in­fec­tion rate and rate of ac­cel­er­a­tion or de­cel­er­a­tion and that’ll give us an­oth­er de­ci­sion,” Row­ley said.

He said well be­fore April 30, Gov­ern­ment will eval­u­ate the na­tion­al re­sponse and state of in­fec­tion and that will de­ter­mine what de­ci­sions are made and what new dead­lines are is­sued. All de­ci­sions will be based on sci­en­tif­ic ad­vice from pro­fes­sion­als and those on the front­lines, Row­ley added.

Row­ley said while T&T was for­tu­nate to get the kind of in­fec­tion re­port they got up to yes­ter­day meant “…. we’re get­ting away.”

“We’re in a rel­a­tive­ly good po­si­tion, we have to hold the line,” he said.

Row­ley said Gov­ern­ment was prepar­ing for the next phase via a roadmap to re­cov­ery, but couldn’t say when T&T would emerge from the COVID cri­sis. Due to the cri­sis’ dam­age on the coun­try, Row­ley said the ap­point­ed ex­pert team is cur­rent­ly analysing the po­si­tion.

Row­ley’s chair­ing the team, the vice-chair­man is Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Robert Le Hunte and co-chair UTC chair­man Ger­ry Brooks.

Oth­er mem­bers in­clude for­mer min­is­ters Mot­t­ley and Dook­er­an, health eco­nom­ics Pro­fes­sor Karl Theodore, Min­is­ter in Fi­nance Min­istry Al­li­son West, busi­ness­man Robert Bermudez, First Cit­i­zens’ Karen Dar­basie, busi­ness­man Chris­t­ian Mout­tet, ac­counts ex­pert Col­in Soo Ping Chow, busi­ness­man Sean Roach, CAL chair­man Ron­nie Mo­hammed, busi­ness­man Vin­cent Per­reira, Fi­nance per­ma­nent sec­re­tary Vish­nu Dan­paul, for­mer Fi­nance PS Al­li­son Lewis, UWI econ­o­mist Gre­go­ry McGuire, To­ba­go econ­o­mist Sylver­ine Hazel, JTUM’s Christo­pher Hen­ry, NATUC’s Michael An­nisette, To­ba­go busi­ness­man Al­lan Warn­er and pub­lic in­ter­est rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ron­dell Fields.

The team will con­sult oth­ers al­so.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert re­ceived the team’s first draft re­cent­ly and asked them to re­fine it. They’re ex­pect­ed to re­turn a re­port to Im­bert in a week. The re­port will be made pub­lic.

Row­ley’s hop­ing by month-end they have an­oth­er draft and it can work in May. If T&T isn’t out of the dan­ger zone un­til May-June, he’ll al­low un­til the end of May to fin­ish the plan. He said the de­vel­op­ment will give Gov­ern­ment an op­por­tu­ni­ty to “do some­thing we’ve had dif­fi­cul­ty do­ing be­fore.”

He added Gov­ern­ment has to de­ter­mine the lev­el of risk to take re­gard­ing re­turn­ing to nor­mal ac­tiv­i­ties. Row­ley said Gov­ern­ment would make de­ci­sions based on an as­sess­ment of the rate and cause of in­fec­tions and pop­u­la­tion lev­els. De­pend­ing on lev­els, T&T may have to walk along­side the “re­al­i­ties” of the sit­u­a­tion as some ac­tiv­i­ties restart.

As a re­sult of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, he said the mid-year Bud­get re­view (in May) may not be done as it usu­al­ly is, though Gov­ern­ment would re­port on the sit­u­a­tion, which changes dai­ly.

Row­ley said T&T couldn’t ex­pect to come in­to the virus and get out with­in 90 days.

“We hope by the end of three months we should be in a bet­ter po­si­tion than at the be­gin­ning. But there’s no coun­try ex­posed to this that has come out of it and de­clared vic­to­ry,” he said, not­ing some South Ko­re­ans who’d test­ed neg­a­tive were now pos­i­tive again.

“That’s fright­en­ing – it’s a tack back as we’d say. We don’t know what this virus will leave us with but we have re­silient pop­u­la­tion. The as­sign­ment will be for us to pick up the pieces, and re­build our lives, post-COVID.”

Yes­ter­day, Dook­er­an who at one point was work­ing in Wash­ing­ton, briefly told the T&T Guardian, “I’m pleased for the op­por­tu­ni­ty.”