An­na-Lisa Paul

The man­age­ment of the Mar­riott Ho­tel at In­vaders Bay, Port-of-Spain, has de­nied ru­mours that the es­tab­lish­ment is be­ing used as a ‘quar­an­tine ho­tel’.

The Mar­riott’s Area Di­rec­tor, Pub­lic Re­la­tions for Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and North South Amer­i­ca, Za­sha Perez Gal­lar­do re­spond­ed to emailed queries yes­ter­day stat­ing, “Please note that it is not cor­rect that the ho­tel is a quar­an­tine ho­tel.”

In re­sponse to ques­tions about whether or not any of the ho­tel guests were ill and had been re­ceiv­ing med­ical treat­ment, she wrote, “As a mat­ter of pri­va­cy we can­not com­ment on guests or groups at the ho­tel.”

Gal­lar­do’s re­sponse did not orig­i­nate in the email thread which had been ini­tial­ly di­rect­ed to the Mar­riott’s Gen­er­al Man­ag­er Nicol Khelawan, but fol­lowed an email which had been sent to the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram and copied to the Min­istry of Health’s Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er, Can­dice Al­can­tara.

On Sat­ur­day, ru­mours be­gan cir­cu­lat­ing that over 250 per­sons from the af­flu­ent sec­tor of so­ci­ety re­ferred to as the “one-per­centers” had at­tend­ed a pri­vate func­tion down the is­lands and that a few of them had since been di­ag­nosed with the COVID-19 virus.

Al­though health of­fi­cials had on Sat­ur­day in­di­cat­ed they were aware of the claims, Paras­ram de­nied the Health Min­istry knew of any such par­ty.

Among the al­le­ga­tions was that scores of peo­ple who had re­port­ed­ly at­tend­ed the al­leged par­ty were rushed to a pri­vate lab to be test­ed.

How­ev­er, Paras­ram said the own­ers/op­er­a­tors of all pri­vate labs were man­dat­ed to send all the COVID-19 re­sults to his of­fice or face sanc­tions.

On Sun­day, a pic­ture ap­peared on so­cial me­dia in which a long line of cars was seen out­side a pri­vate med­ical fa­cil­i­ty in Wood­brook, with the cap­tion claim­ing some of the par­ty-go­ers had gone to be test­ed for the virus.