Loyse Vin­cent

Health of­fi­cials are cur­rent­ly retro­fitting the De­part­ment of Ma­rine Re­sources and Fish­eries build­ing at Glen Road to house COVID-19 pris­on­ers in To­ba­go.

The move comes af­ter there was a COVID-19 out­break at the To­ba­go prison last week.

Fol­low­ing the dis­cov­ery of one pos­i­tive COVID-19 in­mate, two days lat­er thir­teen pris­on­ers and five pris­ons of­fi­cers test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus. There are cur­rent­ly 45 pris­on­ers and 60 prison of­fi­cers as­signed to the To­ba­go Prison, which is the on­ly one on the is­land. The pris­on­ers have since been trans­port­ed to the Clax­ton Bay Pris­ons Fa­cil­i­ty.

Con­fir­ma­tion of the tem­po­rary fa­cil­i­ty came from To­ba­go’s Coun­ty Med­ical Of­fi­cer of Health Dr Tiffany Hoyte, dur­ing a COVID-19 brief­ing yes­ter­day.

“When every­thing is put in place and it has of­fi­cial­ly been de­clared of­fi­cial­ly a build­ing that can be used as a tem­po­rary fa­cil­i­ty for the pris­ons go­ing for­ward it will be used to re­lo­cate any pris­on­ers that have test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19.”

She said the pris­on­ers have been placed in iso­la­tion at the fa­cil­i­ty and are re­port­ed­ly do­ing well.

Dur­ing the brief­ing it was al­so dis­cussed that the largest num­ber of in­fec­tions on the is­land was record­ed af­ter the out­break of the To­ba­go prison. The sta­tis­tics al­so show that the rate of To­ba­go’s COVID-19 cas­es is high­est among per­sons be­tween the ages of 25 and 29 years-old fol­lowed by per­sons be­tween the ages of 30 and 34, Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Of­fi­cer Brid­gette Smith said.

“In the 25-39-year-old age group, we see more per­sons be­ing af­fect­ed with 35 men be­ing in­fect­ed ver­sus 25 women. Women how­ev­er dom­i­nate in the un­der 25- year age group.”

She said re­search al­so in­di­cates that this is re­lat­ed to a num­ber of cas­es in the el­der­ly pop­u­la­tion as they have had el­der­ly COVID-19 pos­i­tive cas­es and they do not leave home. She said there is a high lev­el of “risk to the el­der­ly pop­u­la­tion when younger per­sons are not be­ing as care­ful as they should.”

Ac­cord­ing to Smith COVID-19 map­ping of the is­land re­vealed that most of the cas­es were found in To­ba­go West, which runs from part of Scar­bor­ough down to Crown Point.

“We see that the ma­jor­i­ty of cas­es re­side in the north­east end of the is­land. North­side is not spared at all we some cas­es scat­tered on the north and east of To­ba­go.”

Most of the cas­es were con­cen­trat­ed in Scar­bor­ough which is the is­land’s on­ly iden­ti­fied hotspot.

She said, “We see Scar­bor­ough present­ly car­ry­ing 31 cas­es.”

This is fol­lowed by 13 cas­es in the Canaan/Bon Ac­cord area. The Epi­demi­o­log­i­cal Of­fi­cer em­pha­sised how­ev­er that the cas­es re­flect­ed in the map­ping ex­er­cise on­ly re­flect the pos­i­tive COVID-19 cas­es and do not in­clude the “hun­dreds of con­tacts that were iden­ti­fied from each case.”

Sta­tis­tics al­so re­vealed that the ma­jor­i­ty of those cas­es were hy­per­ten­sive and asth­mat­ic. Of the lat­est 103 sam­ples test­ed there are no new cas­es in To­ba­go. How­ev­er, there are 35 ac­tive cas­es and two deaths. To date, 1,445 sam­ples have been sub­mit­ted for test­ing on the is­land.

1 more COVID-19 death

For the sec­ond time this week, the death toll for COVID-19 has risen as an ad­di­tion­al death was record­ed yes­ter­day bring­ing the to­tal of fa­tal­i­ties from the virus up to 93.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease by the Min­istry of Health, the lat­est death was an el­der­ly fe­male with “pre-ex­ist­ing med­ical con­di­tions.”

The min­istry al­so con­firmed 11 new cas­es of the virus, but it not­ed: “The num­ber of pos­i­tive cas­es re­port­ed usu­al­ly re­flects the sam­ples tak­en dur­ing the last 3 days and not the last 24 hours.”

With­in the last 24 hours, how­ev­er, sam­ples were tak­en from 188 peo­ple for test­ing.

De­spite the new­ly con­firmed cas­es, the to­tal num­ber of ac­tive cas­es con­tin­ued to de­crease af­ter 64 peo­ple were re­leased from the min­istry’s care; five were dis­charged from pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ties while 59 were re­leased from home self-iso­la­tion as re­cov­ered com­mu­ni­ty cas­es. The num­ber of ac­tive cas­es now stands at 1,661 of which 1,516 were in home self-iso­la­tion.