Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Sev­er­al unan­swered ques­tions are sur­round­ing the coun­try’s sec­ond phase of COVID-19 in­fec­tions and the Min­istry of Health is yet to con­clu­sive­ly state what catal­ysed this sec­ond phase and what caused the sus­tained com­mu­ni­ty trans­mis­sion of the virus for the past two months. But ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter of Health, Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, the elec­tion is not to be blamed.

“One of the peaks which Dr Hinds men­tioned was the peak in Sep­tem­ber which was way af­ter the elec­tion and would seem to co­in­cide with that last lap with the week­end. That was way af­ter the elec­tion so let’s deal with facts,” Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh said in re­sponse to a ques­tion dur­ing yes­ter­day’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence.

The “last lap” Deyals­ingh re­ferred to was on Au­gust 16; the day af­ter it was an­nounced beach­es would once again be closed but al­so the day be­fore the reg­u­la­tions would be im­ple­ment­ed.

This led to beach lovers rush­ing their favourite spots to ex­pe­ri­ence the sun, sand and sea be­fore re-en­ter­ing a pe­ri­od of re­stric­tions from Au­gust 17. The 28-day pe­ri­od was sup­posed to end on Sep­tem­ber 12 but was ex­tend­ed un­til Oc­to­ber 11.

Dr Hinds is ex­pect­ed to be at to­mor­row’s press con­fer­ence to present the sta­tis­ti­cal da­ta and ad­dress the is­sue.

The sec­ond phase of in­fec­tions be­gan on Ju­ly 20 with case 139 but no ev­i­dence has yet sur­faced to de­fin­i­tive­ly point the fin­ger at what sparked it. On Au­gust 22, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram, how­ev­er, pre­sent­ed with links to il­le­gal im­mi­gra­tion.

“There were cas­es through­out that would have in­duced spread mean­ing con­tact with per­sons that would have had re­cent en­try in­to Trinidad and To­ba­go. So that has been a fea­ture of phase two in cer­tain in­stances, es­pe­cial­ly in the ear­ly days,” he said.

But while on the sur­face it ap­pears to be the most prob­a­ble source, the gov­ern­ment has been very care­ful not to la­bel it as the smok­ing gun, which was ev­i­dent when Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Stu­art Young em­pha­sised the dis­tinc­tion while Guardian Me­dia was pos­ing a ques­tion to him dur­ing the Sep­tem­ber 12 press con­fer­ence.

“I don’t know where you’re get­ting that it was con­firmed that the sec­ond wave came from il­le­gal im­mi­gra­tion, so I just want to de­bunk that straight away. What was sug­gest­ed ear­ly o’clock is there seemed to have been some of those ear­ly cas­es that may have had a link...the vast ma­jor­i­ty, there was no such link found what­so­ev­er,” he said.

44 more test pos­i­tive

There are now 2,078 ac­tive cas­es of COVID-19 af­ter 44 peo­ple test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus with­in the last 24 hours, the Min­istry of Health con­firmed in its up­dates yes­ter­day. It brings the to­tal num­ber of peo­ple to have con­tract­ed the virus lo­cal­ly since March 12 to 3,945.

The to­tal num­ber of peo­ple to have re­cov­ered from the virus lo­cal­ly have al­so in­creased to 1,802 af­ter four peo­ple were dis­charged from pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ties while 45 peo­ple in home iso­la­tion al­so re­cov­ered and were re­leased from the care of the Min­istry. This brings the to­tal num­ber of peo­ple to be re­leased from hos­pi­tal to 839 and the to­tal num­ber of peo­ple to be re­leased from home iso­la­tion to 963.

The num­ber of deaths re­mained at 65.