SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young says he is still await­ing a re­sponse from Roy­al Caribbean on whether it will al­low Gov­ern­ment to use the Vi­sion of the Seas to quar­an­tine over 300 Tri­ni na­tion­als on board for 14 days when they ar­rive in T&T wa­ters.

Young gave the up­date dur­ing yes­ter­day’s Min­istry of Health’s COVID-19 vir­tu­al me­dia brief­ing. Young first an­nounced the sea quar­an­tine plan on Sun­day, say­ing a quar­an­tine in T&T wa­ters would al­low health of­fi­cials to mon­i­tor and test re­turn­ing na­tion­als and on com­ple­tion, they would be al­lowed to re­turn di­rect­ly to their fam­i­lies. 

The Roy­al Caribbean has been repa­tri­at­ing its em­ploy­ees in the Caribbean, with its most re­cent drop off be­ing done in St Vin­cent.

Mean­while, on re­ports that 29 St Vin­cent crew mem­bers from the ship had test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said those re­sults were from sero­log­i­cal tests and not from Poly­merase Chain Re­ac­tion (PCR) tests, which he said is the gold stan­dard in test­ing.

He said he had been in con­tact with the CMO for St Vin­cent as they await the PCR test re­sults on that group as the sero­log­i­cal test­ing is known to about 50 to 60 per cent ac­cu­rate.

“Let us wait for the re­sults of the PCR and then we can make a de­fin­i­tive judge­ment or hy­poth­e­sis based on those re­sults which are the gold stan­dard,” Paras­ram said.

 Young al­so again as­sured the thou­sands of na­tion­als strand­ed abroad that they will be al­lowed to re­turn home.

“All na­tion­als who are not in T&T and want to re­turn, you will be per­mit­ted to re­turn, as we’ve said and as I will re­peat here this morn­ing, what we are do­ing is very care­ful­ly man­ag­ing the process and be­lieve you me, we do un­der­stand the dif­fi­cul­ties that each and every one of you na­tion­als face who are out­side of T&T want­i­ng to re­turn as well as your fam­i­lies and what it is you are go­ing through,” Young said.

How­ev­er, he said while the min­istry is grant­i­ng ex­emp­tions, it can­not al­low those na­tion­als who have the means to char­ter their own flights to take prece­dence over less for­tu­nate cit­i­zens.

“From a fair­ness point of view, that can’t be the test at this stage be­cause some­one says they can char­ter a plane to fly in will get prece­dence over some­one who is a more needy case,” Young said.

He said the ex­emp­tions are be­ing man­aged in a way that does cause the health care sys­tem to be over­whelmed.

 Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh al­so ad­vised cit­i­zens to con­tin­ue to prac­tice per­son­al hy­giene and wear face masks, as he says the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) be­lieves the world is still in the first wave of the virus.

SDeyals­ingh said while T&T has no new pos­i­tive cas­es, the glob­al num­bers have risen to 5.7 mil­lion.

He said while the Gov­ern­ment can­not leg­is­late the wear­ing of masks and prac­tis­ing per­son­al hy­giene, it con­tin­ues to use strong moral sua­sion to urge the pub­lic to com­ply.

He said there are cur­rent­ly 85 na­tion­als in quar­an­tine, five at the Cas­ca­dia Ho­tel, 21 at the Tacarigua Rack­et Cen­tre and 59 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Debe cam­pus.