Camille McEach­nie

Act­ing As­sis­tant Chief Fire Of­fi­cer for To­ba­go David Joseph-Thomas says all con­tin­gency plans are in place to en­sure “nor­mal” op­er­a­tions con­tin­ue, es­pe­cial­ly at the air­port, as 114 of the is­land’s 350 of­fi­cers re­main in self-quar­an­tine af­ter one of their col­leagues test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 last Sat­ur­day at the Crown Point sta­tion.

“I wish to as­sure the trav­el­ling pub­lic ... we un­der­stand our du­ty of care to the aero­drome and trav­el­ling pub­lic of Trinidad. We know that this is the fes­tive sea­son, so we have done all that we can do to en­sure that the air­port re­mains safe,” Joseph-Thomas said.

He said 114 of­fi­cers were sent to self-quar­an­tine “out of an abun­dance of cau­tion,” not­ing that as soon as the of­fi­cer test­ed pos­i­tive all oth­er of­fi­cers as­so­ci­at­ed with him were sent home and oth­ers re­placed them on Sun­day.

He said all sta­tions across To­ba­go and Trinidad are on stand­by to as­sist if there is an emer­gency at the air­port and con­tin­gency plans are in place for any pos­si­ble in­ci­dent, in­clud­ing COVID-19 in­fec­tions among of­fi­cers.

“Be­fore the pos­i­tive case, we were do­ing our rou­tine du­ty in that we had all sta­tions, all the ap­pli­ances and equip­ment, san­i­tized,” he said.

The self-quar­an­tined of­fi­cers are ex­pect­ed to re­turn to work on De­cem­ber 24, he said.

The lat­est sta­tis­tics from the Di­vi­sion of Health yes­ter­day in­di­cat­ed COVID cas­es in at 135, of which 26 are ac­tive.

Mean­while, he is al­so giv­ing the as­sur­ance that the Scar­bor­ough Fire Sta­tion, cur­rent­ly un­der­go­ing re­pairs, will be com­plet­ed by Feb­ru­ary 2021.

The sta­tion was gut­ted by an elec­tri­cal fire in April 2019. Its re­pair is bud­get­ed to cost $800,000.

Mean­while, the lat­est sta­tis­tics from the Min­istry of Health re­vealed that there were 19 new cas­es.

In its up­date yes­ter­day, the min­istry said the cas­es were tak­en dur­ing the pe­ri­od De­cem­ber 8-10 and one of the new cas­es was a re­cent­ly repa­tri­at­ed per­son.

It added that 536 peo­ple are cur­rent­ly in home self-iso­la­tion, 177 of whom are from the prison sys­tem.