Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The clock is tick­ing for the Min­istry of Health af­ter fears over the lo­cal trans­mis­sion of COVID-19 con­tin­ued to grow yes­ter­day, fol­low­ing the an­nounce­ment that Re­pub­lic Bank’s West Mall branch was forced to close be­cause the daugh­ter of an em­ploy­ee was the lat­est per­son to con­tract the virus in T&T.

The child was pa­tient 141 and is feared to have con­tract­ed it lo­cal­ly, just as was the case with pa­tient 139. The min­istry is now do­ing con­tact trac­ing on the two fe­male pa­tients so that they can test the per­sons they may have come in­to con­tact with be­fore learn­ing they had the virus.

Speak­ing dur­ing the min­istry’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh de­scribed the sit­u­a­tion as “con­cern­ing” but as­sured it was not “cause for pan­ic”.

“What we are do­ing now is be­hav­ing as if there is a re­al pos­si­bil­i­ty that these cas­es are linked to oth­er cas­es,” Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said, cau­tious not to make any con­clu­sion on their clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the virus’ spread in the coun­try.

Paras­ram said he would await the re­sults of the con­tact trac­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions on the two cas­es.

“At this stage, we are deal­ing with lo­cal cas­es un­til proven oth­er­wise, as we have done for case 116, 117 just be­fore we be­gan to have a host of im­port­ed cas­es. So we are treat­ing it as a lo­cal case un­til proven oth­er­wise - mean­ing un­til we can find an ex­ter­nal link,” he said.

The CMO said most of the pri­ma­ry con­tacts of pa­tient 139 had been swabbed and test­ed. Pa­tient 139 is a 63-year-old woman who was ill for over a week and did not self-iso­late and went out in­to pub­lic.

He said they had al­ready re­ceived the ini­tial re­sults on mem­bers of her house­hold.

“Out of the eight peo­ple we have all neg­a­tives...those peo­ple would now be fol­lowed up for an ad­di­tion­al 14 days from the time the in­di­vid­ual who was pos­i­tive was re­moved from the home. They would now be un­der strict home quar­an­tine be­ing mon­i­tored by both the CMOH as well as the TTPS for the next 14 days to en­sure that we fol­low them up for the full time and if symp­toms de­vel­op, they would be swabbed at that time again,” Paras­ram said.

He al­so said of pa­tient 139’s eight pri­ma­ry con­tacts, three left for To­ba­go on Mon­day be­fore the in­fec­tion was de­tect­ed. They have since been test­ed and quar­an­tined in To­ba­go. Out of the nine cowork­ers of pa­tient 139, Paras­ram said sev­en had been con­tact­ed and swabbed to date. He an­tic­i­pat­ed the re­main­ing two would have been con­tact­ed yes­ter­day.

Deyals­ingh said sur­veil­lance footage from the Re­pub­lic branch showed the moth­er and daugh­ter close­ly in­ter­act­ing with some 11 em­ploy­ees. The em­ploy­ees were con­tact­ed and swabbed, he said, adding the branch was al­so closed for two days for sani­ti­sa­tion.

“We have got­ten some neg­a­tive re­sults. So the pri­ma­ry con­tacts, be­ing par­ents etc, we’ve got­ten the re­sults for some of them which are lat­er yes­ter­day (Wednes­day evening),” he said.

“There are few­er house­holds in­volved in this case than the oth­er case (pa­tient 139) so it’s a small­er group of peo­ple in terms of ex­po­sure.”

De­spite the lat­est de­vel­op­ments, the min­istry is con­fi­dent in the mea­sures im­ple­ment­ed thus far to pro­tect the pop­u­la­tion.

Asked if the de­vel­op­ment raised any con­cerns for stu­dents who were back at school and can­di­dates cam­paign­ing for the up­com­ing Gen­er­al Elec­tion, both Deyals­ingh and Paras­ram re­ferred to the es­tab­lished guide­lines for both groups.

See Ed­i­to­r­i­al on page 12