Some 14 To­ba­go health­care work­ers who are di­rect­ly in­ter­fac­ing with COVID-19 pos­i­tive pa­tients are cur­rent­ly be­ing housed at an undis­closed fa­cil­i­ty at Sig­nal Hill, ac­cord­ing to Med­ical Chief of Staff Dr Vic­tor Wheel­er.

Dur­ing a tour of new iso­la­tion units at the Scar­bor­ough gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal on Fri­day, how­ev­er, Wheel­er said this is be­ing done be­cause the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion has been emo­tion­al­ly tax­ing for many doc­tors and nurs­es be­cause they are un­able to tan­gi­bly in­ter­act with their loved ones when they re­turn to their homes and in some in­stances, there are some in­di­vid­u­als who are even un­able to re­turn home be­cause of dis­crim­i­na­tion.

“In a cou­ple cas­es their fam­i­ly put them out, which I can’t un­der­stand that. In one case it was an el­der­ly rel­a­tive, but I have a dif­fi­cul­ty in ac­cept­ing that, be­cause re­al­ly and tru­ly staff are still afraid, but they are see­ing that ef­forts are be­ing done for their safe­ty and are ac­tu­al­ly much more com­fort­able in the en­vi­ron­ment,” Wheel­er said of the rea­son for putting up the work­ers at the fa­cil­i­ty un­til the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic ends.

Wheel­er ad­mit­ted that ini­tial­ly, there was poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween man­age­ment and the staff in re­la­tion to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic but said ef­forts are be­ing made to rem­e­dy the sit­u­a­tion.

“Those who were di­rect­ly af­fect­ed are ei­ther self-iso­lat­ing at home and one or two are in that fa­cil­i­ty (Sig­nal Hill) and we al­so have Rovanel’s and Ca­noe Bay. And know­ing the plans that we have in place for those ex­posed and ad­vis­ing them of it has helped calm things down quite a bit, so this is be­ing done to let you know we are tak­ing se­ri­ous ef­forts ... com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which was not re­al­ly at its best at the be­gin­ning, that was re­al­ly the gist of the prob­lem,” he said.

Al­though the doc­tors and nurs­es are be­ing housed at the fa­cil­i­ty at the ex­pense of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly, when asked about a haz­ard al­lowance for front­line med­ical staff dur­ing the COVID-19 cri­sis at a news con­fer­ence last week, Wheel­er said that sce­nario was not catered for in the health­care work­ers’ con­trac­tu­al agree­ment

“That is not part of the terms and con­di­tions that we have and I don’t know. That is some­thing that maybe the union, be­cause the health­care work­er is rep­re­sent­ed by a union and I haven’t seen it come up as a sep­a­rate is­sue,” he said then.

As of yes­ter­day at 4 pm, 66 sam­ples from To­ba­go had been sub­mit­ted to the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) lab­o­ra­to­ry for test­ing and three of them were pos­i­tive while the is­land has not record­ed any deaths. Some 13 peo­ple have al­so com­plet­ed their quar­an­tine and there are 49 in­di­vid­u­als still in quar­an­tine.