Rishard Khan

& Camille McEch­nie

Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram has de­nounced the idea of us­ing To­bag­o­na­ni­ans as a metaphor­i­cal guinea pig for the lift­ing of re­stric­tions and re­open­ing the econ­o­my.

In a video mes­sage to Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley yes­ter­day, the To­ba­go Busi­ness Cham­ber’s chair­man, Mar­tin George, called on the Prime Min­is­ter to “ful­ly re­open the To­ba­go econ­o­my, use it as a test case, and let’s see if we can man­age it.”

But speak­ing dur­ing a Min­istry of Health news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Dr Paras­ram shot down the idea as too risky.

“No part of the coun­try, whether it be To­ba­go or any of the coun­ties...would be used as a test case,” he said.

“Be­cause what we are im­ply­ing is that we’d use an area and see if the cas­es rise and of course if the cas­es rise there would be an in­creased num­ber of deaths. No part of the coun­try would be used as a test case be­cause Trinidad and To­ba­go is one coun­try...our Pub­lic Health Reg­u­la­tions are dri­ven by pub­lic health guid­ance as well as oth­er fac­tors which the Prime Min­is­ter would al­ways take in­to con­sid­er­a­tion pri­or to mak­ing those ul­ti­mate de­ci­sions.”

In the video, George ob­served that the par­tial eas­ing of re­stric­tions, while a good start, do not go far enough, and has proven im­prac­ti­cal for tour op­er­a­tors in To­ba­go.

George said times are hard on the is­land for every­one and sug­gest­ed that re­open­ing it can help.

“There is a tremen­dous lev­el of hard­ship be­ing ex­pe­ri­enced by or­di­nary cit­i­zens,” George said.

“It can be a way to go give a boost and fil­lip to eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery.”

Ac­cord­ing to sta­tis­tics from the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly’s Fi­nance and En­ter­prise Sec­re­tary, Joel Jack, ap­prox­i­mate­ly 6,000 peo­ple work­ing in the tourism in­dus­try have lost their jobs.

He said tourism ac­counts for ap­prox­i­mate­ly 13 per cent of the is­land’s Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct.

Last Sun­day, the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) called for coun­tries around the world to stop us­ing lock­downs as their pri­ma­ry COVID-19 con­trol mea­sure.