Fash­ion de­sign­er Pe­ter Elias is mak­ing a bold move in the mid­dle of an eco­nom­ic melt­down and glob­al health pan­dem­ic to open a new busi­ness. Giv­en the daunt­ing cir­cum­stances that the coun­try faces in this COVID-19 pe­ri­od, he has had his doubts, but he has de­cid­ed to go ahead with this ven­ture. "I have sec­ond-guessed the de­ci­sion a few times, but I re­main fo­cused and be­lieve in what we of­fer, in my team and the many loy­al clients we serve," he told the Sun­day Guardian.

Stu­dents and na­tion­als who have been stuck out­side T&T since the coun­try closed its bor­ders in March to con­tain the spread of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic may get an ear­ly Christ­mas gift in the form of an ex­emp­tion to re­turn home.

The Bar­keep­ers & Op­er­a­tors As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad & To­ba­go (BOATT) is hop­ing that when the Prime Min­is­ter ad­dress­es the coun­try to­mor­row, dur­ing his Sat­ur­day press con­fer­ence, that he will an­nounce an ease of re­stric­tions on the Food and Bev­er­age Sec­tor.

Al­though the Min­istry of Health (MOH) has re­ceived 190,000 rapid anti­gen test­ing kits for dis­tri­b­u­tion in­to health care set­tings, they will not be dis­trib­uted just yet as val­i­da­tion tests must first be done.

Par­ent­ing is no easy task. While the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of rais­ing chil­dren is shared in some two-par­ent house­holds, sin­gle par­ents have to be both moth­er and fa­ther. The sit­u­a­tion is fur­ther com­pound­ed with the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic forc­ing many peo­ple to be at home. They have to fig­ure out how to jug­gle work, school and child­care some­times with lit­tle or no help.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh is as­sur­ing the pub­lic that the triva­lent vac­cine be­ing ad­min­is­tered in the pub­lic health sec­tor is safe and ef­fec­tive.

Health of­fi­cials in T&T are work­ing to es­tab­lish a vol­un­tary blood do­na­tion sys­tem which will re­place the cur­rent ‘chit sys­tem’ and re­sult in pa­tients re­ceiv­ing blood when they need it.

There have been 42 new pos­i­tive cas­es of COVID-19 record­ed, bring­ing the to­tal num­ber of ac­tive cas­es in the coun­try to 1,236 pa­tients.

The lat­est up­date from the Min­istry of Health is con­firm­ing an­oth­er death from COVID-19, bring­ing the na­tion­al toll to 107 per­sons.

Speak­ing dur­ing a Min­istry of Health vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day, Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer in charge of the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem, Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards, in­di­cat­ed that the per­son was un­der the age of 25 and had pre-ex­ist­ing med­ical con­di­tions.

The lat­est up­date from the Min­istry of Health is con­firm­ing an­oth­er death from COVID-19, bring­ing the na­tion­al toll to 106 per­sons.

Al­though Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley eased the re­stric­tion on go­ing to beach­es over the week­end, few turned up on To­ba­go beach­es.