Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram on Fri­day con­firmed that the two pa­tients who have so far died from COVID-19 will not be af­ford­ed cer­e­monies at homes or church­es where the body is present and this will be the pro­to­col go­ing for­ward.

“The guide­lines speak broad­ly to al­low­ing for cre­ma­tion and bur­ial. How­ev­er, in terms of cre­ma­tion we are look­ing at a cre­ma­to­ri­um on­ly. In terms of a bur­ial, we are go­ing to the gravesite on­ly so there is no home vis­its, there is no church vis­its, there is no vis­its oth­er than the fu­ner­al agency to the grave and the fu­ner­al agency to the cre­ma­to­ri­um,” Paras­ram said at a press con­fer­ence at the Min­istry of Health up­dat­ing the coun­try on COVID-19 sta­tis­tics.

Paras­ram said they had al­so start­ed con­sul­ta­tion with var­i­ous re­li­gious groups about this guide­line so as to lim­it any con­tact with de­ceased pa­tients to re­duce any fur­ther spread of the virus.

He al­so as­sured that prop­er con­tact trac­ing has so far been done for all 66 pos­i­tive COVID-19 cas­es. How­ev­er, he ad­mit­ted that there may be hid­den con­tacts —peo­ple who may have picked up the virus from a pa­tient that they wouldn’t be able to iden­ti­fy to au­thor­i­ties.

“There are peo­ple along the way for in­stance and let me use an ex­am­ple, some­body has symp­toms and they go in­to a su­per­mar­ket. They come in­to con­tact with a trol­ley, they have symp­toms, they cough­ing and sneez­ing. The par­ti­cles go on­to the trol­ley han­dle and some­body else comes right af­ter them, we don’t know who that per­son is and us­es the same trol­ley. Maybe a few min­utes lat­er. That’s what we call hid­den con­tacts in terms of trac­ing,” Paras­ram said.

This pos­si­bil­i­ty un­der­lined the need for the wider pub­lic to stay at home as much pos­si­ble, he said.

“We should be­have as if the per­son be­fore us who used the trol­ley was ac­tu­al­ly con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed and when we start to use that premise we will ac­tu­al­ly do so­cial dis­tanc­ing, do hand wash­ing, do sani­ti­sa­tion. Don’t touch your face,” he said.

“So the hid­den con­tacts in an epi­demi­o­log­i­cal sense are our great­est risk of spread. How­ev­er, if peo­ple are ill or peo­ple are show­ing signs of any sort and they stay home, the hid­den con­tacts are re­duced sig­nif­i­cant­ly, they shouldn’t be any hid­den con­tacts.

“Pri­ma­ry, sec­ondary and ter­tiary con­tacts that are known to us are well self-iso­lat­ed and well fol­lowed.”