The pub­lic health mea­sures in place for COVID-19 are work­ing. Med­ical of­fi­cials re­port­ed that fol­low­ing a peak in COVID-19 cas­es around mid-Au­gust and plateau­ing fig­ures dur­ing Sep­tem­ber, trends have shown an ap­par­ent downtick in T&T’s curve.

Speak­ing dur­ing the Min­istry of Health’s me­dia brief­ing yes­ter­day, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram con­firmed, “We are see­ing that curve bend­ing down­wards.” He said as more da­ta is col­lect­ed over the next few days, they will be able to make fur­ther as­sess­ments.

Re­fer­ring to the last two weeks as he point­ed to da­ta re­gard­ing pos­i­tive cas­es, Paras­ram said, “It av­er­ages out to about just about 40 cas­es per day over that pe­ri­od of time.”

Claim­ing that the pos­i­tiv­i­ty rate now stood be­tween six and nine per cent per day, he said the au­thor­i­ties were hop­ing to get both rates down even fur­ther.

The CMO said 53 per cent of the cas­es were males, com­pared to 47 per cent of women.

Re­gard­ing the age de­mo­graph­ics of in­fect­ed cas­es, he re­vealed that 16.47 per cent of the cas­es were record­ed in peo­ple less than 25 years of age, and 56.43 per cent of cas­es were in peo­ple be­tween 25 and 49 years of age.

He said this meant that 73 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion less than 49 years old was af­fect­ed.

Be­tween those aged 50 to 59 years, 14.36 per cent of cas­es were record­ed, while 17 per cent of cas­es were record­ed among peo­ple over 60.

Paras­ram said ap­prox­i­mate­ly 30 per cent of cas­es had been found among males and fe­males who were be­tween the ages of 30 and 39.

Tho­racic Med­ical Di­rec­tor Dr Michelle Trot­man thanked the pop­u­la­tion for ad­her­ing to the pub­lic guide­lines to sani­tise, so­cial dis­tance, and wear masks.

She said the mea­sures had proven to be ef­fec­tive to stem the spread of the virus and she ap­pealed to those not yet en­forc­ing them, to get on board.

Trot­man said with the on,set of the flu sea­son which runs from Oc­to­ber 2020 to May 2021, masks can al­so help in re­duc­ing the spread of the H1NI virus among the pop­u­la­tion.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh en­cour­aged vul­ner­a­ble and at-risk groups to take ad­van­tage of the 100,000 free flu vac­cines which will be pro­vid­ed to the pop­u­la­tion be­gin­ning Sep­tem­ber 29.

The vac­cine which pro­tects against the H1N1 virus and not the com­mon flu can be ac­cessed at all ante-na­tal clin­ics, chron­ic care clin­ics, and at two spe­cial­ly se­lect­ed clin­ics in each coun­ty.

The sec­ond batch of 100,000 vac­cines will ar­rive in the coun­try at the be­gin­ning of Jan­u­ary 2021.

Paras­ram cau­tioned the pop­u­la­tion that the symp­toms for both COVID-19 and In­fluen­za were sim­i­lar and shared the same form of trans­mis­sion via res­pi­ra­to­ry droplets.

He said it was ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult to de­ter­mine which virus a per­son had con­tract­ed with­out a test be­ing done and he ad­vised peo­ple to quar­an­tine once they be­gan ex­hibit­ing symp­toms.

He urged peo­ple to stay at home and re­frain from go­ing to work or school dur­ing this pe­ri­od, and to get test­ed.

A to­tal of 234 na­tion­als who have been repa­tri­at­ed to T&T cur­rent­ly re­main housed at quar­an­tine sites in­clud­ing the Chan­cel­lor Ho­tel (19); Cas­ca­dia Ho­tel (43); Home of Foot­ball (24); Paria Suites (78); and the Debe cam­pus (32).