Even as se­ri­ous crimes have re­port­ed­ly been on the de­crease dur­ing the cur­rent COVID-19 pan­dem­ic in T&T, the mur­der rate con­tin­ues to rise with the count reach­ing 159 as com­pared to 151 for same pe­ri­od last year up to Wednesday.

Few pri­vate­ly-owned med­ical lab­o­ra­to­ries have shown in­ter­est in do­ing COVID-19 test­ing, with many say­ing the process is too ex­pen­sive or com­pli­cat­ed to make sense for their bot­tom line.

Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith last night rub­bished the opin­ion of “arm­chair ex­perts” bent on crit­i­cis­ing the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice for their ac­tion in road­blocks dur­ing the COVID-19 Stay-at-Home mea­sure.

Al­most half of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s pop­u­la­tion could be at big risk for con­tract­ing COVID-19.

As the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic con­tin­ues to have an im­pact on the glob­al sup­ply of goods and ser­vices, con­sumers are al­ready fac­ing in­creased prices at the gro­ceries and are now be­ing told to brace for more in­creas­es.

Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies and Tech­nolo­gies Com­pa­ny Ltd com­plet­ed a pre­lim­i­nary walk­through of the for­mer Petrotrin Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery be­tween March 2 and March 6, 2020.

Even as calls in­crease for more lo­cal test­ing to be done to get a bet­ter idea of the state of the COVID-19’s spread across the coun­try, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says some 63 sur­veil­lance tests done for the virus have re­turned neg­a­tive.

This was the re­ac­tion of Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley af­ter he learnt of the dra­mat­ic drop in US oil prices while at the first meet­ing of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Road Map to Re­cov­ery team yes­ter­day.

Oil prices crum­pled even fur­ther yes­ter­day, and US stocks sank to their worst loss in weeks as wor­ries swept mar­kets world­wide about the eco­nom­ic car­nage caused by the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.

The world oil mar­kets were turned up­side down yes­ter­day as the price of a bar­rel of crude crashed to less than ze­ro dol­lars and up to late last night was trad­ing at US60 cents a bar­rel—less than the cost of a bot­tle of wa­ter.

Thir­ty-three Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­als strand­ed in Bar­ba­dos by the COVID-19 virus are ex­pect­ed to re­turn home to­day.

State-owned Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um has said it plans to sell scrap iron as part of its strat­e­gy to raise cash amidst the crash of oil prices.