Gail Alexan­der

Gov­ern­ment has been able to dis­trib­ute 8,000 masks for pro­tec­tion against COVID-19 in Trinidad and To­ba­go re­cent­ly and up to 20,000 more are be­ing ob­tained this week­end, says Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh.

Re­ply­ing to Op­po­si­tion queries in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, Deyals­ingh said dis­tri­b­u­tion of the maks promised by Gov­ern­ment had al­ready start­ed through the Foun­da­tion for the En­hance­ment and En­rich­ment of Life (FEEL) since the week be­fore last week. At that time, he said 6,000 masks were dis­trib­uted in Trinidad and 2,000 in To­ba­go and 15,000 to 20,000 more were be­ing ob­tained this week­end.

“Be­tween NGOs and Gov­ern­ment, there will be hun­dreds of thou­sands,” Deyals­ingh said.

He said the masks are be­ing done at no cost to the Health Min­istry.

“We’re not buy­ing it, there’s no tief­ing and cor­rup­tion - Mamoo not mak­ing mask. This is of no di­rect cost to tax­pay­ers, the pri­vate sec­tor is part­ner­ing with FEEL and it’s avail­able to cit­i­zens free,” he said.

Nipdec is al­so eval­u­at­ing ten­ders this week for more mask sup­pli­ers

Deyals­ingh al­so dis­missed a query from San Juan MP Fuad Khan about re­con­sid­er­ing the to­tal clo­sure of de­liv­ery/pick up or­ders by the food­ser­vice in­dus­try. While Khan said the sec­tor has wors­ened since the COVID sit­u­a­tion, Deyals­ingh said it was a trou­bling query com­ing from a med­ical doc­tor.

Deyals­ingh said the newest in­for­ma­tion on the virus from in­ter­na­tion­al ex­perts was that young peo­ple in their 20s, 30s, and 40s with COVID-19 were hav­ing blood clot­ting prob­lems and dy­ing. He said it would be reck­less of Gov­ern­ment to ig­nore this new sci­en­tif­ic da­ta and sim­ply re­open the econ­o­my with­out re­gard for lives.

“This new ev­i­dence has thrown a span­ner in­to the works,” he added, say­ing de­ci­sions go­ing for­ward would be made on sci­en­tif­ic in­for­ma­tion and da­ta.

Khan asked if Gov­ern­ment would con­tin­ue to keep the econ­o­my closed be­cause of a “mi­nus­cule” num­ber of deaths. Deyals­ingh said he was glad to hear the Op­po­si­tion speak­ing of “mi­nus­cule deaths” as “it means we’ve done a won­der­ful job and I thank the Op­po­si­tion for recog­nis­ing that”.

On an­oth­er query Deyals­ingh al­so said to date, five pri­vate labs had ap­plied to do COVID-19 test­ing but none were ap­proved.

So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Camille Robin­son-Reg­is mean­while ad­mit­ted that not all par­ents would have re­ceived food cards but they were hop­ing to cov­er most of them.

In re­sponse to a ques­tion from MP David Lee, Robin­son-Reg­is said she was sur­prised he’d asked that since MPs were in­volved and each were giv­en 500 food cards which were sup­posed to help 20,500 fam­i­lies.

Lee said there were 3,000 in his con­stituen­cy alone and 500 cards may not have helped the sit­u­a­tion. Robin­son-Reg­is said most par­ents would have got­ten food cards and on­ly a “mi­nus­cule” amount may not have re­ceived this.