Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Na­tion­als in the Unit­ed King­dom (UK), Eu­rope, Suri­name and the Mid­dle East are ex­pect­ed to re­turn home with­in the next few days as Gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to ex­am­ine the lo­gis­tics of repa­tri­at­ing cit­i­zens and al­low­ing some to leave T&T as the coun­try’s quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties are now at ca­pac­i­ty.

“We are cur­rent­ly wait­ing on fur­ther de­tails of those grant­ed ex­emp­tions to re­turn from the UK/ Eu­rope and Mid­dle East to pro­vide us with their trav­el arrange­ments.

“We ex­pect them to be­gin ar­riv­ing in the next few days,” Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Stu­art Young told Guardian Me­dia in a What­sApp mes­sage.

“We are al­so ex­pect­ing per­sons from Suri­name, and some oth­er ju­ris­dic­tions in the next few days to­talling 30-35,” he added.

He not­ed that some na­tion­als from these coun­tries, par­tic­u­lar­ly from the Mid­dle East, UK and even In­dia have al­ready start­ed to re­turn.

How­ev­er, with plans be­ing made to al­low T&T stu­dents study­ing in the Unit­ed States to leave to re­sume their stud­ies, Young said the min­istry is cur­rent­ly work­ing out how to use these flights to repa­tri­ate na­tion­als.

He said: “We are cur­rent­ly work­ing out the de­tails and tim­ing of flights to take Trinida­di­an stu­dents to the US and to be­gin the repa­tri­a­tion of na­tion­als in the US with the first repa­tri­a­tion flight.

“This re­quires us to work out the num­bers of spaces avail­able in state quar­an­tine and those who will pay for state-su­per­vised quar­an­tine.”

Young al­so in­di­cat­ed there were a small num­ber of se­ri­ous med­ical cas­es which re­turned.

“So the cy­cles of repa­tri­a­tion and safe quar­an­tine con­tin­ue as we bal­ance the safe re­turn of our na­tion­als with the pro­tec­tion of per­sons in Trinidad and To­ba­go,” he said.

Speak­ing at a Min­istry of Health vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence last week, Young in­di­cat­ed the na­tion­als to re­turn from the UK, Eu­rope and the Mid­dle East to­talled 80.