Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Lo­cal COVID-19 cas­es ap­pear to be ris­ing and health of­fi­cials are hop­ing it does not sig­nal the start of a third phase of in­fec­tions. 

“We’re now be­gin­ning to see slight­ly larg­er num­bers of cas­es per day than we’d seen through­out the ear­ly part of the year- the first sev­en days or so,” Di­rec­tor of the min­istry’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion Dr Av­ery Hinds said yes­ter­day dur­ing a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence. 

“So where­as we had be­tween eight and 12 cas­es most times per day, we did not that there were cas­es ris­ing in­to the twen­ties- 25, 21 over the past two days and this may very well be as a re­sult of any of the gath­er­ing and con­gre­ga­tion ac­tiv­i­ties that may have oc­curred two weeks ago- two weeks ago be­ing ba­si­cal­ly the be­gin­ning of the Christ­mas fes­tiv­i­ties.”

The min­istry had been an­tic­i­pat­ing an im­pact from the hol­i­day sea­son but ex­pect­ed it lat­er this month. 

“We are hop­ing that this doesn’t es­tab­lish it­self as a ris­ing trend but we do note the be­gin­nings of an in­crease and we do note that they may very well be re­lat­ed to what­ev­er ac­tiv­i­ties took place be­hind the scenes over the Christ­mas pe­ri­od,” Dr Hinds said. 

Pro­fes­sor of Vi­rol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Dr Christo­pher Oura said: “Even if it’s a small uptick in num­bers you have to be wary. The waves start rel­a­tive­ly slow­ly and then in­creas­es and builds strength.”

He not­ed that it was still too ear­ly to say if this is the start if a new phase of in­fec­tions as there are nu­mer­ous vari­ables at play. But he did note that cit­i­zens’ be­hav­iours play a role in de­ter­min­ing the mag­ni­tude of the phase if there is to be one.

“The height of the wave does de­pend on so many things. It de­pends on peo­ple’s be­hav­iour and the im­por­tance that they take the pub­lic health pre­cau­tions but it al­so de­pends on, you know, how close peo­ple are to­geth­er and how much peo­ple are con­gre­gat­ing and how much peo­ple are con­gre­gat­ing in­doors etc,” Dr Oura said. 

Dr Hinds not­ed that it is es­pe­cial­ly im­por­tant that cit­i­zens ad­here to the ad­vice and re­frain from gath­er­ings dur­ing this time which.

“We’re not rec­om­mend­ing gath­er­ings - we’re say­ing that we don’t want peo­ple to gath­er at all and if you end up gath­er­ing be­cause of some ne­ces­si­ty that we’d keep the num­bers be­low a cer­tain lev­el,” he said.

“We can’t cheat the virus. There aren’t loop­holes that we can ex­ploit that will al­low us to es­cape the con­se­quences of in­ad­vis­able gath­er­ings. What­ev­er we do will show up in in­creased num­bers if we don’t abide by very strict guide­lines.”

The min­istry con­firmed eight cas­es yes­ter­day from sam­ples col­lect­ed over the week­end.