Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Health has im­ple­ment­ed a new pro­to­col for trav­ellers com­ing in­to T&T from the Unit­ed King­dom af­ter news broke of a new strain of the virus cir­cu­lat­ing with­in its pop­u­la­tion there.

In a re­lease yes­ter­day, the min­istry said those leav­ing the UK for T&T, where the time be­tween the date of de­par­ture and the date of ar­rival in­to T&T is 14 days or less, will need a neg­a­tive PCR test with­in 72 hours be­fore trav­el­ling (much like the man­date for all peo­ple en­ter­ing T&T at this time) and a manda­to­ry 14-day quar­an­tine pe­ri­od to be spent in a state or state-su­per­vised fa­cil­i­ty.

“This new pro­to­col de­vi­ates from the cur­rent quar­an­tine pe­ri­od to be served by per­sons en­ter­ing the coun­try from oth­er high-risk coun­tries, which present­ly re­mains sev­en days in state or state-su­per­vised quar­an­tine fol­lowed by sev­en days home quar­an­tine. All oth­er pro­to­cols as it re­lates to en­try in­to Trinidad and To­ba­go re­main the same at this time. This is to en­sure the con­tin­ued pro­tec­tion is af­ford­ed to the mem­bers of the pub­lic,” the re­lease said.

Com­ment­ing on news of the new strain on his Face­book page yes­ter­day, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said he will “keep look­ing out for the in­ter­est of all the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

“We will con­tin­ue to do what we have been do­ing all along. Be In­formed and Re­spect THE SCI­ENCE of vi­rol­o­gy and epi­demi­ol­o­gy and be guid­ed by our trained health care ex­perts,” Row­ley said.

He al­so took a jab at the Op­po­si­tion for their com­men­tary on Gov­ern­ment’s han­dling of the pan­dem­ic. “We have with­stood the band­wag­o­nist UNC, who have con­sis­tent­ly un­der­mined our na­tion­al ef­forts whilst trum­pet­ing “cures” like hy­drox­y­chloro­quine, pun­cheon and lime, sun­shine etc. Al­so, they said it was all a hoax to which the Gov­ern­ment was re­act­ing. Now they are call­ing for the VAC­CINE NOW, even be­fore we have any al­lo­ca­tion iden­ti­fied yet in the world CO­V­AX sup­ply,” he said.

News of the new strain broke over the week­end.

Mean­while in its up­date yes­ter­day, the Min­istry of Health said two more peo­ple had died from the virus, bring­ing the coun­try’s death toll to 125. The re­cent fa­tal­i­ties were an el­der­ly male and fe­male who both had pre-ex­ist­ing med­ical con­di­tions.

The min­istry al­so con­firmed 12 new in­fec­tions from sam­ples tak­en be­tween De­cem­ber 18 and 20, bring­ing the to­tal num­ber of in­fec­tions since March 12 up to 7,012.