RISHARD KHAN
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

There has been a small rise in COVID-19 cas­es in the coun­try and this has prompt­ed the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO), Dr Roshan Paras­ram, to re­new calls for cit­i­zens to re­main vig­i­lant de­spite the low num­bers, as he blames com­pla­cen­cy for the in­creased num­bers.

Speak­ing dur­ing a Min­istry of Health vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Mon­day, Dr Paras­ram not­ed the in­crease came with­in the last week.

"First, we had sev­en (cas­es); then we had a spike of 10; and now we have 14 new cas­es over the last 24 hours," he said.

"Pri­or to that, we had been hov­er­ing any­where be­tween a sev­en-day rolling av­er­age of 3 or four for up­wards of over a month or more," the CMO point­ed out.

The cas­es, he in­di­cat­ed, all came from Coun­ty Ca­roni, where there were about three ma­jor clus­ters.

"Those clus­ters would have pos­si­bly been in­volv­ing two fam­i­lies, places of work.  We re­al­ly saw that from one in­di­vid­ual be­ing in­fect­ed—that one per­son was able to spread it to quite a large num­ber of peo­ple in a short space of time," he said.

This, he said, brings the sev­en-day rolling av­er­age up to sev­en.  This is why he re­mind­ed cit­i­zens to re­main vig­i­lant at all times.

"We are list­ed in Trinidad and To­ba­go as com­mu­ni­ty spread.  We have not changed that des­ig­na­tion for quite a while now.  When we look at the clas­si­fi­ca­tion from WHO (the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion) we are at a place where we can be clas­si­fied as low com­mu­ni­ty spread.  This in­ci­dent or in­ci­dents we are see­ing in Ca­roni is rea­son for us to main­tain our vig­i­lance through­out the coun­try."

"COVID-19 is here.  It is in the coun­try.  It hasn't gone away and there has been a lit­tle com­pla­cen­cy over the last cou­ple of weeks be­cause of the low num­bers, in my view," Dr Paras­ram said.

This clus­ter, he said, had the po­ten­tial to cas­cade in­to a more sig­nif­i­cant out­break, "in a very short space of time".

Mean­while, Min­is­ter of Health, Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, dug his heels in to de­fend his pol­i­cy that the coun­try would on­ly pro­cure and ad­min­is­ter vac­cines ap­proved by the WHO.