RISHARD KHAN
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The en­try of two ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers in­to the coun­try with the Delta vari­ant does not war­rant any change to the bor­der en­try pro­to­cols, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram main­tains.

Dur­ing the Health Min­istry’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day, Dr Paras­ram ex­plained that these were the on­ly two pos­i­tive cas­es to arise out of some 14,222 ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers who en­tered the coun­try since the bor­ders re­opened on Ju­ly 17th.

"If we look at that co­hort, two per­sons pos­i­tive out of 14,222 it means that 99.986 per cent of them did not de­vel­op COVID up­on en­try in­to the coun­try, at least not that we are aware. It is an ex­treme­ly small per­cent­age of peo­ple to change the pol­i­cy for," he said.

He cred­it­ed the large suc­cess of the en­try pro­to­col to the pro­vi­sion of a manda­to­ry neg­a­tive PCR test tak­en with­in 72 hours of ar­rival.

"We have seen a sub­stan­tial de­crease in the num­ber of pos­i­tives we're pick­ing up (af­ter en­try) once we had that pol­i­cy (neg­a­tive PCR test) in­tro­duced a few months ago. Pri­or to that, we would have al­most as 10 per cent of peo­ple com­ing in via repa­tri­a­tion be­ing picked up. With that in place...un­vac­ci­nat­ed (trav­ellers) or not, it has gone down to about one per cent or there about," he said.

He re­it­er­at­ed that peo­ple en­ter­ing the coun­try be ex­tra vig­i­lant over the fol­low­ing two weeks up­on ar­rival and get test­ed as soon as any symp­toms de­vel­op. He said these trav­ellers should try to keep their con­tacts to a min­i­mum to re­duce the risk of any on­ward trans­mis­sion.