Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The Gov­ern­ment has reim­ple­ment­ed COVID-19 re­stric­tions in a bid to cur­tail the cur­rent up­ward tra­jec­to­ry of cas­es.  For the next 21 days, ef­fec­tive as of 12 am to­day– April 15­– beach­es are closed to the pub­lic ex­cept those af­fil­i­at­ed with leatherback tur­tle con­ser­va­tion ac­tiv­i­ties, in-house din­ing is pro­hib­it­ed in restau­rants, cin­e­mas, casi­nos and bars and the num­ber of peo­ple al­lowed to gath­er in pub­lic was brought down to no more than five.

It’s the sec­ond time for the year the Gov­ern­ment has had to reim­ple­ment re­stric­tions in an at­tempt to bring the spread un­der con­trol.

On April 1, the Min­istry of Health re­in­stat­ed a ban on con­tact sports. It was the first mea­sure to be reim­ple­ment­ed since the sec­ond “lock­down” pe­ri­od was en­forced on Au­gust 17, 2020. 
When num­bers first start­ed to rise ear­li­er in March, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley warned that an­oth­er “lock­down” pe­ri­od would be im­posed if they con­tin­ued to rise.

How­ev­er, he not­ed that un­like pre­vi­ous­ly done, the Gov­ern­ment would not be able to af­ford to pro­vide fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance to cit­i­zens.
In that time the sev­en-day rolling av­er­age of dai­ly cas­es in­creased by over 1,400 per cent– go­ing from as low as three per day to now 42.

The Min­istry of Health al­so con­firmed the largest num­ber of pos­i­tive cas­es for the year yes­ter­day with 85 sam­ples col­lect­ed be­tween April 11 and 13 re­turn­ing pos­i­tive.

This fol­lowed 70 con­fir­ma­tions on Tues­day. Two ad­di­tion­al deaths were al­so record­ed yes­ter­day bring­ing the to­tal fa­tal­i­ties from the virus in the coun­try up to 148.

They were both adult males with mul­ti­ple co­mor­bidi­ties ac­cord­ing to the min­istry’s up­date. By yes­ter­day evening, ac­tive cas­es stood at 630.

Dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion yes­ter­day, the Min­istry of Health’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor Dr Av­ery Hinds con­firmed that cas­es were not on­ly on the rise but were al­so spread­ing fur­ther across the coun­try ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly. The ma­jor­i­ty of cas­es are con­cen­trat­ed along the East-West cor­ri­dor- one of the more dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed ar­eas of the coun­try. 

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said the move was made in con­sul­ta­tion with the min­istry’s med­ical team, the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and the Prime Min­is­ter. 

He said the re­stric­tions im­ple­ment­ed al­so took in­to ac­count an an­tic­i­pat­ed larg­er spike. 

“What we at the min­istry now have to do is fac­tor in the post-East­er surge which would start to come this week­end and ask our­selves if we don’t do some­thing now, we will have an­oth­er surge two weeks from now on top of our East­er surge so our hos­pi­tal oc­cu­pan­cy is go­ing to in­crease,” he said.

In just over a month, hos­pi­tal oc­cu­pan­cy rose to 25 per cent, he in­di­cat­ed. 

Min­is­ter Deyals­ingh in­di­cat­ed that re­li­gious ser­vices would not be af­fect­ed by the re­duc­tion in peo­ple al­lowed to con­gre­gate in pub­lic. How­ev­er, he said prop­er COVID-19 pro­to­cols must be ob­served and there should not be more than 50 per cent oc­cu­pan­cy.