SHAS­TRI BOODAN

UNC Al­der­man on the Ch­agua­nas Bor­ough Coun­cil, Maris­sa Ram­lo­gan, is call­ing on Gov­ern­ment to set up COVID-19 care fa­cil­i­ties in Cen­tral Trinidad, as the virus con­tin­ues to rage through the pop­u­la­tion.

Al­der­man Ram­lo­gan, who is al­so the Pub­lic Re­la­tions Of­fi­cer of the UNC’s Na­tion­al Women’s Arm, told Guardian Me­dia on Sun­day the health fa­cil­i­ties in Ch­agua­nas are in­ad­e­quate to han­dle COVID-19 cas­es in the event of a rapid out­break.

“We are not see­ing Gov­ern­ment set­ting up ad­di­tion­al care fa­cil­i­ties in Cen­tral. We should be more proac­tive in­stead of re­ac­tive,” she said. “The Ch­agua­nas Health Cen­tre does not even have park­ing for a hand­ful of ve­hi­cles and can on­ly han­dle a lim­it­ed num­ber of pa­tients.”

She added: “The Min­is­ter of Health has said that some pa­tients would have to be home quar­an­tined.  But of you look at some com­mu­ni­ties, many peo­ple live in cramped, tight hous­ing con­di­tions and in some ar­eas, there are more than two hous­es on one lot of land. This may spell dis­as­ter for peo­ple liv­ing un­der these con­di­tions. How are they go­ing to stop COVID-19 and share fa­cil­i­ties?”

Ram­lo­gan said this coun­try is not pre­pared to han­dle any ex­po­nen­tial out­break of the coro­n­avirus, based on feed­back she re­ceived from sev­er­al in­ter­est groups with whom she had been li­ais­ing over the past week.

“Test­ing con­tin­ues to be an is­sue be­cause we are not get­ting enough test­ing done,” she point­ed out. “We do not know the true num­ber of cas­es we have in T&T.”

The UNC Al­der­man is urg­ing all cit­i­zens to wear their masks prop­er­ly to en­sure every­one re­mains safe.