Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Health has said that two of the six peo­ple who test­ed pos­i­tive for the Delta vari­ant of the COVID-19 virus, were ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple.

They test­ed pos­i­tive for vari­ant af­ter ar­rival af­ter ar­riv­ing in the coun­try. 

How­ev­er, the Min­istry did not say how long af­ter com­ing in­to the coun­try, they then test­ed pos­i­tive and has not in­di­cat­ed whether, as ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple, they were al­lowed to go straight home af­ter ar­riv­ing in the coun­try.

It said, how­ev­er, that they were placed in iso­la­tion “as soon as” the pos­i­tive COVID-19 test re­sult was re­ceived.

Both of them pre­sent­ed neg­a­tive PCR tests be­fore they ar­rived in T&T.

The cur­rent en­try pro­to­cols al­low for ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers to by­pass any quar­an­tine or fur­ther test­ing once a neg­a­tive PCR test tak­en with­in 72 hours of ar­rival is pre­sent­ed.

This means the trav­ellers in ques­tion are like­ly to have been among the pop­u­la­tion when they test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus.

Health of­fi­cials and ex­perts, lo­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, have ex­plained that the COVID-19 vac­cines do not pre­vent some­one from get­ting in­fect­ed with the dis­ease. In­stead, it helps to sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duce the chance of get­ting ill, the sever­i­ty of the ill­ness and the risk of be­ing hos­pi­talised and dy­ing. 

Mean­while, for­mer Min­is­ter of Health Dr Fuad Khan does not be­lieve there is a need to add more lay­ers of pro­tec­tion to the ex­ist­ing bor­der en­try pro­to­col af­ter two ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers in­fect­ed with the Delta vari­ant slipped through. 

“You al­ready have enough. Just con­tin­ue go­ing as you go­ing. At the end of the day, you can­not pro­tect 100 per cent. You have to face the fact that you are go­ing to be af­fect­ed soon­er or lat­er,” Dr Khan told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day.

Health of­fi­cials such as Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram pre­vi­ous­ly in­di­cat­ed that it was im­prac­ti­cal and un­fea­si­ble to have an en­try sys­tem that was 100 per cent ef­fec­tive at pre­vent­ing the vari­ant from en­ter­ing. He not­ed the ex­ist­ing pro­to­col, along with the pub­lic health mea­sures, was suf­fi­cient to pro­tect the pop­u­la­tion in the rare in­stance that a ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed per­son en­ters the coun­try with the vari­ant. 

6 more COVID-19 deaths

Mean­while, six more peo­ple have died from the COVID-19 with­in the last 24 hours and and 189 more peo­ple have been in­fect­ed.
Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Health’s dai­ly up­date, the fa­tal­i­ties were one el­der­ly male, two el­der­ly fe­males, two mid­dle-aged fe­males and one mid­dle-aged fe­male with co­mor­bidi­ties. COVID-19 deaths now stand at 1,342.
The ad­di­tion­al cas­es were from sam­ples col­lect­ed be­tween Sep­tem­ber 3 and 6.

At 3,691, ac­tive cas­es are now at the low­est they’ve been since May 7 (3,480). This is large­ly due to the re­lease of 263 peo­ple from un­der the min­istry’s care; 234 were re­leased from home self-iso­la­tion as re­cov­ered com­mu­ni­ty cas­es while 29 were dis­charged from pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ties. 
The to­tal num­ber of peo­ple to re­ceive a first dose of a COVID-19 vac­cine stood at 528,017 of these 417,358 com­plet­ed their vac­ci­na­tion regime.