Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith says the Stay-at-Home or­der is not meant to cre­ate pan­ic nor con­fine peo­ple to their homes, as was the case with a cur­few dur­ing an SoE. Rather, he says it is meant lim­it­ing one’s con­sti­tu­tion­al right so a greater good can be achieved.

Try­ing to clar­i­fy some of the is­sues with the or­der dur­ing a tour of the Ch­agua­nas Mar­ke­ton Sat­ur­day, Grif­fith said if banks, gro­ceries, phar­ma­cies and even the me­dia con­tin­ue to func­tion, this means peo­ple would leave their homes and ven­ture out to con­duct busi­ness.

“You have the right to be on the road. You have the right to walk. You have the right to pur­chase a news­pa­per. You have the right to go to the su­per­mar­ket. What you can­not do is open a non-es­sen­tial busi­ness. You can­not con­verge in groups of ten,” he said.

In the case of el­der­ly-care givers, he said, “That per­son has a right to leave their home and go to work.”

And for fam­i­lies us­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty to es­cape for some re­lax­ation Down the Is­lands or on their plea­sure yachts, Grif­fith said they were not about pre­vent­ing peo­ple from vis­it­ing their homes wher­ev­er they may be, or even get­ting fast food and med­ica­tion.

How­ev­er, he said, “Do it and get back home. If some­one has a home Down the Is­lands, we can­not stop you from leav­ing Trinidad to go there. In fact, if you want to go and stay in that home for two weeks, bet­ter yet for me.”

He said once groups do not ex­ceed ten peo­ple it was okay - but if two or three boats con­verge to form a raft-about, then that would be a breach of the reg­u­la­tions. He re­in­forced the warn­ing by health of­fi­cials that the next two weeks would be crit­i­cal to pre­vent­ing the spread of COVID-19, as he urged peo­ple to stay at home as much as pos­si­ble.

The CoP al­so de­nied there was high ab­sen­teeism amongst of­fi­cers.

“The of­fi­cers have stepped up to the plate, they have turned up for du­ty and risk­ing their health and that of their fam­i­ly mem­bers, they are do­ing their job,” he said.

Re­fer­ring to the sit­u­a­tion which had led to the clo­sure of the Arou­ca Po­lice Sta­tion, af­ter one of­fi­cer re­tuned from unau­tho­rised leave abroad and de­vel­oped flu-like symp­toms, Grif­fith said 100 of­fi­cers were now quar­an­tined. He said steps were be­ing made to get the re­sults back as quick­ly as pos­si­ble be­cause it was im­per­a­tive to have them back at work.