Gail Alexan­der

The Health Min­istry is ex­am­in­ing the fea­si­bil­i­ty of do­ing dri­ve-through COVID-19 test­ing since the min­istry now has rapid anti­gen test­ing abil­i­ty.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh in­di­cat­ed this in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day in re­sponse to var­i­ous Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress queries.

Deyals­ingh said the min­istry is now do­ing train­ing and val­i­da­tion of the rapid anti­gen tests at the To­ba­go, San­gre Grande and Trinidad Pub­lic Health lab . When the min­istry is com­fort­able the anti­gen test­ing match­es the cur­rent­ly used PCR test­ing, these anti­gen tests will be in­stalled at Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency units, in­clud­ing at Cou­va, Rio Claro and oth­er places.

Deyals­ingh couldn’t say im­me­di­ate­ly when the val­i­da­tion and train­ing will be com­plet­ed. Anti­gen test kits were bought through the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion, he said.

Deyals­ingh al­so said the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice’s mon­i­tor­ing of self-iso­lat­ing pa­tients was large­ly ef­fec­tive ex­cept with one or two peo­ple.

He not­ed that a Point Fortin man un­der quar­an­tine had bro­ken this to go to the gym twice.

“I un­der­stand he will be charged,” Deyals­ingh added.

On queries about the han­dling of pris­on­ers with COVID-19, Gov­ern­ment Sen­a­tor Clarence Ramb­harat de­tailed mea­sures, in­clud­ing say­ing that there is a space for ill in­mates away from oth­er pris­on­ers.

Deyals­ingh al­so list­ed the 18 fu­ner­al homes han­dling fu­ner­als of COVID de­ceased. He said costs range from $1,500 to $7, 575 and are borne by the rel­e­vant re­gion­al health au­thor­i­ties and fam­i­lies.

Asked about a $16,000 bill a fam­i­ly was al­leged­ly asked to pay, he said he’d ex­am­ine it if the in­for­ma­tion was re­ceived.

One more virus death, toll now 113

The Min­istry of Health yes­ter­day con­firmed that one more per­son had died from COVID-19, tak­ing the over­all toll to 113. The per­son was iden­ti­fied as an el­der­ly fe­male with co-mor­bidi­ties. 

The min­istry al­so con­firmed 39 ad­di­tion­al in­fec­tions yes­ter­day from sam­ples tak­en be­tween No­vem­ber 14 and 16. This brought the to­tal num­ber of in­fect­ed peo­ple since March 12 to 6,135.

Twen­ty peo­ple were al­so re­leased from the min­istry’s care yes­ter­day. These re­leas­es brought the num­ber of peo­ple to re­cov­er from the virus lo­cal­ly to 5,460.

The re­cent­ly-con­firmed in­fec­tions and re­leas­es brought the num­ber of ac­tive cas­es up to 562 - 36 in hos­pi­tals, 25 in step-down/tran­si­tion­al fa­cil­i­ties and 462 in home self-iso­la­tion. How­ev­er, of these in home self-iso­la­tion 66 are with­in the prison sys­tem. There were al­so 215 peo­ple in state quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties.