Raphael John-Lall

raphael.lall@guardian.co.tt

The first tranche of the As­traZeneca vac­cines al­lo­cat­ed to T&T un­der the CO­V­AX sys­tem is en route from South Ko­rea and will ar­rive Tues­day ac­cord­ing to Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh.

‘The vac­cines are cur­rent­ly en route to Trinidad and To­ba­go. The vac­cines are com­ing from South Ko­re­an Bio and it is a World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) As­traZeneca ap­proved vac­cine. They will be trans­port­ed to Brus­sels then to Am­s­ter­dam then to Mi­a­mi and then to Trinidad and To­ba­go,” he an­nounced dur­ing a press con­fer­ence host­ed by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s yes­ter­day.

“The cur­rent date of ar­rival is March 30, if every­thing goes ac­cord­ing to plan. If all flights are on time and there are no weath­er de­lays.”

Deyals­ingh said half of the vac­cines will be stored at C-40 in Ch­aguara­mas and the rest at the Cou­va Chiller ahead of ad­min­is­tra­tion at 21 sites across T&T.

He said 3,000 of the dos­es will be sent to To­ba­go on Thurs­day and the rest will be dis­trib­uted through­out Trinidad on East­er week­end. The na­tion­al roll­out will start on the Tues­day af­ter East­er.

“We will con­tin­ue with front­line health­care work­ers. Si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly, we will vac­ci­nate those over 60 in non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases clin­ics—those per­sons are al­ready known to us. They will be vac­ci­nat­ed on their clin­ic days. We al­so plan on the non-clin­ic days to open it up to mem­bers of the gen­er­al pub­lic over 60 with NCD’s but by ap­point­ment on­ly. That will eat up our 33, 600 dos­es. We will go af­ter 16,000 per­sons in the first tranche,” the min­is­ter said

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley re­mind­ed cit­i­zens that T&T is still in the mid­dle of the pan­dem­ic and ap­pealed to them not to let their guard down.

“Don’t be­come COVID weary,” he said, “we are not in a post-pan­dem­ic pe­ri­od. Nowhere in the world is in a post-pan­dem­ic pe­ri­od.”

Dr Row­ley said he knows many peo­ple are tired as they have been deal­ing with pan­dem­ic re­stric­tions for a year but warned that if the coun­try re­turns to a sec­ond lock­down the Gov­ern­ment will not have the re­sources that it had dur­ing the first.

“There will be no re­sources for a Gov­ern­ment bailout. The tens of thou­sands of you who re­ceived a Gov­ern­ment cheque, I am putting you on no­tice now, if we find our­selves back in that po­si­tion there are no re­sources. If you are in the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty and you got a Gov­ern­ment cheque as a VAT re­fund or sup­port for your busi­ness, the re­sources have been used up. Those are the con­se­quences like­ly to flow if we do not stay the course,” he said.

He said if COVID-19 cas­es are kept down, af­ter East­er for the first time in a year, se­nior pri­ma­ry school chil­dren will be able to re­sume in-per­son class­es.

‘This will be a men­tal and psy­cho­log­i­cal lift for the coun­try that you can­not put a dol­lar fig­ure on,” Dr Row­ley said

The Prime Min­is­ter urged the coun­try’s lead­ers, in­clud­ing the Op­po­si­tion Leader, to ad­vise their fol­low­ers to abide by health pro­to­cols to keep cas­es down so that pri­ma­ry school stu­dents could re­turn to phys­i­cal class­es. He al­so called on the po­lice to do their jobs by mak­ing sure peo­ple wear masks and don’t con­gre­gate in large num­bers.

He de­scribed re­ports of At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi at­tend­ing a pri­vate event with more than 10 per­sons as “dis­ap­point­ing.”

In his clin­i­cal up­date, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said there were 15 new cas­es of COVID-19 and one ad­di­tion­al death.

Epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds said there has been a slow but steady in­crease in cas­es last few weeks, a trend that high­light grow­ing fa­tigue in fol­low­ing pub­lic health pro­to­cols.

He said al­though peo­ple are get­ting tired of wear­ing masks and fol­low­ing the oth­er pro­to­cols un­less there was con­tin­ue ad­her­ence there would be se­ri­ous reper­cus­sions.

Med­ical Di­rec­tor at the Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal Dr Michelle Trot­man ad­vised the pop­u­la­tion to fol­low the ba­sic prin­ci­ples of so­cial dis­tanc­ing, san­i­tiz­ing, and wear­ing masks.

“As we see those num­bers want­i­ng to climb up and are ac­tu­al­ly climb­ing up, let us lay the foun­da­tion by get­ting those num­bers back down. Peo­ple hear vac­ci­na­tions are com­ing and it’s all over. Well, it con­tin­ues,” she said.