The Cou­va Med­ical and Mul­ti-Train­ing Fa­cil­i­ty (CMMF) will be re­turned to the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies to con­duct med­ical re­search when the time comes for it to no longer treat COVID-19 pa­tients.

This is ac­cord­ing to the Min­is­ter of Health, Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, in re­sponse to a ques­tion from Guardian Me­dia dur­ing a press con­fer­ence on Wednes­day.

“The Cou­va med­ical fa­cil­i­ty was giv­en, trans­ferred, to the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies...when we take Cou­va off the grid as a COVID fa­cil­i­ty it will re­vert to its own­er,” he said.

“Hope­ful­ly they could use it as a re­search fa­cil­i­ty, a re­search hos­pi­tal sim­i­lar to the mod­el that is used in Mona, Ja­maica and I think as a re­search hos­pi­tal, it will add a sig­nif­i­cant de­gree and pres­tige and al­so aid in de­vel­op­ing new tech­niques that will reach down to the ben­e­fit of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.”

The min­is­ter did not say whether a de­fin­i­tive de­ci­sion was made to re­move the hos­pi­tal as yet.

Speak­ing at a Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee on Oc­to­ber 5, Deyals­ingh first point­ed out the plan for the hos­pi­tal post-COVID and not­ed the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem was be­ing re­viewed by of­fi­cials.

COVID-19 hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions have been steadi­ly de­creas­ing over the last few weeks with just 55 peo­ple ward­ed across the en­tire treat­ment net­work as of Tues­day’s week­ly up­date.