Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says the lat­est pa­tient to have con­tract­ed COVID-19 pos­es no threat to the pop­u­la­tion as the pa­tient had no op­por­tu­ni­ty to spread the virus.
Dur­ing Mon­day’s vir­tu­al Min­istry of Health COVID-19 up­date, Deyals­ingh said the pa­tient, a woman, was among a fam­i­ly of three trans­port­ed from Hous­ton, Texas, in the USA to T&T by an air am­bu­lance last Thurs­day. Fol­low­ing the min­istry’s COVID-19 pro­to­cols for re­turn­ing na­tion­als, he said the fam­i­ly was tak­en to the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion’s Home of Foot­ball in Cou­va for quar­an­tine.

Pub­lic health ex­perts and those in gov­ern­ment have had to make dif­fi­cult and com­plex de­ci­sions to try and get the right bal­ance be­tween to­tal lock­down to stop the virus from spread­ing un­con­trol­lably and eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty to guar­an­tee liveli­hoods.

With Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley ex­pect­ed to make pro­nounce­ments on phase three of the COVID-19 re­open­ing plan on Sat­ur­day, the Bar Own­ers and Op­er­a­tors As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go is call­ing on him to al­low bars to re­sume op­er­a­tions in phase four.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has giv­en per­mis­sion for the re­sump­tion of al­most all eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty one week ahead of the third phase of re­open­ing.

Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said that the new case came from a mem­ber of a fam­i­ly of three that was al­lowed to re­turn to the coun­try on Thurs­day.

An ex­ec­u­tive of the Na­tion­al Pe­tro­le­um Mar­ket­ing Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed, an aux­il­iary fire­fight­er, an IT tech­ni­cian and a pri­ma­ry school teacher are among six peo­ple ar­rest­ed by po­lice for breach­ing the Pub­lic Health Reg­u­la­tions on Fri­day night.

Two Ce­dros fish­er­men, who are quar­an­tined at the Cas­ca­dia Ho­tel in St Ann’s, are claim­ing that they were tak­en there two weeks af­ter be­ing beat­en by Coast Guard of­fi­cers.

The moth­er of a teenag­er who dis­ap­peared in No­vem­ber 2018 be­lieves she spot­ted a girl with a strong re­sem­blance to her daugh­ter in a pho­to of peo­ple res­cued from a hu­man traf­fick­ing camp in Venezuela on Tues­day.

While many peo­ple called for the gov­ern­ment to use a heavy hand to deal with the COVID-19 threat, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley yes­ter­day said his gov­ern­ment chose to in­stead trust the pop­u­la­tion to do the right thing, and he said that faith was re­paid.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh is ad­vis­ing cit­i­zens to con­tin­ue to prac­tice per­son­al hy­giene and wear face masks as he says the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) be­lieves the world is still in the first wave of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young says he is still await­ing a re­sponse from Roy­al Caribbean on whether it will al­low Gov­ern­ment to use the Vi­sion of the Seas to quar­an­tine over 300 Tri­ni na­tion­als on board for 14 days when they ar­rive in T&T wa­ters.

Those with un­der­ly­ing con­di­tions can heap the num­ber of COVID-19 cas­es and as a re­sult every ef­fort must be tak­en to pro­tect this group most vul­ner­a­ble in the fight against the nov­el coro­n­avirus.