Gail Alexan­der

Hold the line.

Bet­ter to be in­con­ve­nienced for a short while to­wards a per­ma­nent so­lu­tion and do what has to be done, to get to a place of bet­ter de­fence against the COVID -19 virus as soon as pos­si­ble.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley gave this ad­vice yes­ter­day, as he pi­lot­ed a mo­tion in Par­lia­ment to ex­tend the State of Emer­gency for three months.

It was an­nounced two weeks ago and will run to Au­gust. De­bate fol­lowed the Pres­i­dent’s re­cent procla­ma­tion for the SoE.

Row­ley de­tailed the gen­e­sis of the pan­dem­ic glob­al­ly and from 2019, when Gov­ern­ment be­gan hear­ing of it. He not­ed the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion de­clared the virus a pub­lic health emer­gency in Jan­u­ary 2020 and Gov­ern­ment de­clared COVID-19 a dan­ger­ous in­fec­tious dis­ease in Jan­u­ary 2020 al­so. It was la­belled a pan­dem­ic in March.

“And since then, all our lives have changed,” he not­ed.

Row­ley said the pop­u­la­tion had to sup­press the in­fec­tion rate or that would un­der­mine the vac­cine pro­gramme “and will re­sult in sig­nif­i­cant hurt to our fam­i­lies, econ­o­my and our­selves in­di­vid­u­al­ly.”

Row­ley added, “This is not some­thing we have an op­tion with. We’ve com­mit­ted our­selves and our fi­nan­cial re­sources to do what has to be done to fight this fight.

“We’ve com­mit­ted our­selves and our re­sources to de­fend every cit­i­zen, old, young or medi­um, male or fe­male, girl or boy from this COVID virus. We’ve been do­ing this, hold­ing the line un­til we can take our coun­try to a lev­el where (the virus) has the po­ten­tial to be­come a nor­mal part of hu­man ex­is­tence but not threat­en­ing us with death and de­struc­tion.”

He said he be­lieves the pop­u­la­tion un­der­stands what is be­ing done, how­ev­er, Gov­ern­ment un­der­stands a cer­tain amount of dis­rup­tion is tak­ing place and the re­sponse to the virus has been dis­rup­tive to so­cial and eco­nom­ic life. But Row­ley said Gov­ern­ment has been en­cour­ag­ing de­fences.

“It’s more im­por­tant to be in­con­ve­nienced for a short while to­wards a per­ma­nent so­lu­tion and do what has to be done so as to get to that place of bet­ter de­fence as soon as pos­si­ble.”

Row­ley re­called Italy, where so many died that peo­ple couldn’t bury their dead. With what oc­curred else­where, T&T had to take ac­tion to pro­tect it­self. With 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple in T&T and 330,000 oth­ers “out­side,” he not­ed the dan­gers fac­ing the coun­try and the need for bor­der clo­sure. While those in­side would have en­joyed pro­tec­tion, Row­ley ad­mit­ted those out­side would have ex­pe­ri­enced in­con­ve­nience.

Trac­ing from in­tro­duc­tion of the face mask law and T&T’s first COVID death, he not­ed steps tak­en to re­duce spread but he al­so ad­mit­ted: “We re­laxed a bit and were not as dili­gent as we could have been. Af­ter low case num­bers and deaths, there was the spike af­ter the Au­gust gen­er­al elec­tion but the spike was quick­ly sup­pressed.”

While the dan­ger was in mix­ing/move­ment of peo­ple, Row­ley said even when Car­ni­val 2021 was can­celled in Feb­ru­ary, the lev­el of in­fec­tions was the low­est with the best com­pli­ance re­sponse . He said it was felt peo­ple might have been miss­ing Car­ni­val and were co-op­er­at­ing.

How­ev­er, Row­ley said there were “ac­tiv­i­ties” around in March and au­thor­i­ties had to re­spond to slow rise of num­bers— and if there was no in­ter­ven­tion there cer­tain­ly would have been the kind of trau­mat­ic re­sults of large num­bers of dead and larg­er num­bers of sick.

Row­ley re­it­er­at­ed T&T has to re­ly on seek­ing vac­cines to reach herd im­mu­ni­ty— 65 to 70 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion, “But we’re not there yet and cur­rent­ly we’re hold­ing the line on in­fec­tions while work­ing to­ward a high­er lev­el of vac­ci­na­tions.”

He al­so re­it­er­at­ed dif­fi­cul­ty to get vac­cines while coun­tries with more au­thor­i­ty and wealth and oth­ers took con­trol of pro­duc­tion out­put. Row­ley said it was hor­ri­ble to ob­serve the vast ma­jor­i­ty of peo­ple in low in­come coun­tries be­ing able to make on­ly small pur­chas­es or get gifts—ob­tain­ing less than one per cent of vac­cines — while a hand­ful of coun­tries took 83 per cent.