Rishard Khan
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Two staff mem­bers of the Princes Town East Sec­ondary School have test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 over the past two weeks. The out­break comes just days be­fore ful­ly-vac­ci­nat­ed Forms 1 to 3 stu­dents are ex­pect­ed to join their se­nior col­leagues in a re­turn to phys­i­cal class­es. 
A state­ment from the Ed­u­ca­tion Dis­trict Health Unit for­ward­ed to Guardian Me­dia through the Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion con­firmed the two re­cent­ly con­firmed cas­es. 
“There were 2 cas­es over the last two weeks, and san­i­ta­tion was com­plet­ed on site. Con­tacts were iden­ti­fied and all nec­es­sary di­rec­tives giv­en,” it said.
Staffers at the school, who re­quest­ed anonymi­ty to pro­tect their jobs, in­formed Guardian Me­dia the school’s ad­min­is­tra­tion was not forth­com­ing with in­for­ma­tion on the pos­i­tive cas­es. 
“The rea­son why we know now is be­cause peo­ple are try­ing to find out and even­tu­al­ly we found out on our own and ad­min­is­tra­tion up to now- they are deny­ing it,” one staffer told Guardian Me­dia. 
The teacher in­di­cat­ed one of the pos­i­tive staffers be­came symp­to­matic while at the school and was lat­er sent home. 
The se­cre­cy sur­round­ing the in­ci­dent, the teacher ex­pressed, was frus­trat­ing. 
In the state­ment to Guardian Me­dia, the Health Unit said: “In terms of in­form­ing staff of sus­pect­ed cas­es on-site, prin­ci­pals and mem­bers of the cri­sis man­age­ment team...man­age this at the school lev­el, main­tain­ing con­fi­den­tial­i­ty and on­ly in­form­ing of con­firmed da­ta.”

“These cas­es were con­firmed over the last week and this week­end. Up­dates on the sta­tus of any staff or stu­dent go di­rect­ly to the in­di­vid­ual pa­tient, who then has to per­mit any­one else to share their med­ical record,”
it added.

An­oth­er staffer told Guardian Me­dia some oth­ers dis­played mild flu-like symp­toms but did not get test­ed. This, they said, was be­cause they at­trib­uted their symp­toms to the dusty class­rooms which ap­pear to have not been cleaned be­fore the re­open­ing. 
The staffers said they are fear­ful for their health.

How­ev­er, their con­cern for the safe­ty of the stu­dents was re­served. They said that stu­dents’ risk of con­tract­ing COVID-19 was low giv­en at­ten­dance at phys­i­cal class­es was dis­mal. They said there have been many days where class­rooms re­mained emp­ty.
Guardian Me­dia reached out to the T&T Uni­fied Teacher’s As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent An­to­nia Tekah-De Fre­itas for com­ment. she said she was un­aware of the sit­u­a­tion but will look in­to it.