Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

It is not yet the time to look in­to restart­ing the econ­o­my ac­cord­ing to econ­o­mist Dr Roger Ho­sein as he be­lieves now is the time to place more em­pha­sis on pro­tect­ing lives than liveli­hoods.

Speak­ing in the Par­lia­ment Wednes­day dur­ing the Mid-Year Bud­get Re­view, Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar called for a re­open­ing of the econ­o­my and restart­ing some sec­tors deemed non-es­sen­tial amid the out­break. 

While Dr Ho­sein agrees that the econ­o­my is cur­rent­ly reel­ing from the pan­dem­ic, the safe­ty of cit­i­zens come first. 

"The first thing that the gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go has to do is to pro­tect lives," he said. 

"In the medi­um term, which will be with­in three to four months I hope giv­en the amount of vac­cines we seem to have been able to pro­cure, the econ­o­my will start to open up."

The coun­try is cur­rent­ly in the mid­dle of its largest and most dead­ly surge of in­fec­tions. Health of­fi­cials have on­ly re­cent­ly stat­ed that the epi­demi­ol­o­gy of the out­break sug­gests it's be­gin­ning to plateau. On Wednes­day the Min­istry of Health's Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion's tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor Dr Av­ery Hinds said cas­es ap­peared to be de­creas­ing with rough­ly a 10 per cent re­duc­tion in fig­ures from last week as com­pared to the week pri­or. 

When con­tact­ed, in­ter­nal med­i­cine spe­cial­ist and host of CNC3's Ask the Doc­tor pro­gramme, Dr Joel Teelucks­ingh said it was still too soon to haz­ard a pre­dic­tion on the tim­ing of any eco­nom­ic restart. 

"We're still see­ing a surge. We're still see­ing quite a num­ber of per­sons who are di­ag­nosed and the death rate has more or less re­mained unchecked through­out the na­tion. So I would think per­haps the next week or two would be use­ful just to see the state of af­fairs in the coun­try in terms of the in­fec­tion rate be­fore ac­tu­al­ly think­ing about an im­me­di­ate re­sump­tion," he said.

But when the time comes for the econ­o­my's re­open­ing, Dr Ho­sein urged that the goal should not be to bring it back to pre-pan­dem­ic ac­tiv­i­ty.

"The restart of the econ­o­my is a beau­ti­ful op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­cal­i­brate all the non­sense in terms of the struc­ture that oc­curred in the time pe­ri­od be­tween 2000 and 2020 when the use of trans­fers of sub­si­dies and the spend­ing out of all the en­er­gy rent led the econ­o­my to be in the form of a ter­ri­ble struc­ture," he said.

"We now have a gold­en op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­set the econ­o­my...I hope that pol­i­cy­mak­ers take this in­to con­sid­er­a­tion."