Sto­ry by BAVI­TA GOPAULCHAN

Sec­re­tary of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion, Dr Kee­gan Bag­gan, says there's no need to pan­ic over the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the coro­n­avirus may be trans­mit­ted through ex­haled air.

The World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) re­cent­ly ac­knowl­edged emerg­ing ev­i­dence, which sug­gests the virus can be spread via aerosol trans­mis­sion, that is, by tiny par­ti­cles sus­pend­ed in the air.

How­ev­er, Dr Bag­gan says Trinidad and To­ba­go’s 'new nor­mal' mea­sures al­ready re­duce the chances of spread.

“It does not sig­nif­i­cant­ly change the over­all man­age­ment be­cause the same pro­ce­dures we are talk­ing about—in terms of the san­i­ti­za­tion and so­cial dis­tanc­ing, reg­u­lar­ly wash­ing hands and wear­ing of masks—will sig­nif­i­cant­ly lim­it that spread,” he ex­plains.

Dr Keegan Baggan, Secretary of the Trinidad and Tobago Medical Association, speaking on THE MORNING BREW on CNC3, this morning.

The Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion sec­re­tary says like the min­istry of health, they too are ex­pect­ing an in­crease in the num­ber of ba­bies be­ing born to­wards 2021, be­cause of the pan­dem­ic lock down.

And he pre­dicts that could mean a slight strain on the health sec­tor.

“When we look at health cen­tres, from the very be­gin­ning we were very well aware that would be a po­ten­tial is­sue,” he points out, “and that's why we en­sured that Fam­i­ly Plan­ning ser­vices were not neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed, no mat­ter how much we had to cut back on.”

Dr Bag­gan notes that more births in the coun­try will trans­late in­to ad­di­tion­al work for the health sec­tor.