BO­BIE-LEE DIXON

bo­bie-lee.dixon@guardian.co.tt

Pro­fes­sor Clive Lan­dis, chair­man of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) COVID-19 Task Force is ad­vis­ing T&T on its es­ca­lat­ing COVID-19 cas­es to “iden­ti­fy your most vul­ner­a­ble com­mu­ni­ties.”

Lan­dis, one of the pan­elists in yes­ter­day’s vir­tu­al dis­cus­sion ti­tled Eth­i­cal Is­sues in the Man­age­ment of the COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic in the Caribbean, host­ed joint­ly by the UWI COVID-19 Task Force and the Na­tion­al Bioethics Com­mit­tee of Ja­maica, com­ment­ed while re­spond­ing to a ques­tion on how T&T could nav­i­gate this pe­ri­od of a sud­den spike in cas­es.

Lan­dis said while he did not pre­sume how to ad­vise the Gov­ern­ment of T&T how to man­age its af­fairs, he would speak to the prin­ci­ples that were need­ed to nav­i­gate the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion.

“We need to have very strong test­ing. And I would say that based on the num­ber of tests be­ing con­duct­ed, which is around 14,000 in Trinidad for the size of its pop­u­la­tion, test­ing should be ramped up,” Lan­dis said.

He said more test­ing was need­ed to find the cas­es as they emerged.

He added: “I think that there was no doubt, there was an el­e­ment of a hid­den epi­dem­ic that was on­go­ing and then it emerged.”

Re­gard­ing how the pan­dem­ic could be man­aged, Lan­dis said the lock­down and re­stric­tions which were im­posed proved to be ef­fec­tive in the first phase of the epi­dem­ic in T&T, which helped the coun­try suc­ceed sig­nif­i­cant­ly in con­tain­ing the epi­dem­ic.

But cur­rent­ly, the area need­ing more em­pha­sis was find­ing out which com­mu­ni­ties were more at risk.

This ad­vice, he not­ed, was not on­ly be­ing is­sued to T&T, rather every­where in the Caribbean should place fo­cus on this.

“Every­one should think what is the com­mu­ni­ty in my coun­try that is the most vul­ner­a­ble…that could be over­looked, that maybe has been over­looked,” said Lan­dis.

Point­ing to a demon­stra­tive ex­am­ple, Lan­dis said Sin­ga­pore was man­ag­ing a very good epi­dem­ic for about a first two-three months and then sud­den­ly it had a huge epi­dem­ic, which it did not an­tic­i­pate.

It was sub­se­quent­ly found the rea­son for the in­crease in cas­es was in the mi­grant com­mu­ni­ties—a com­mu­ni­ty he said ex­ists al­so in T&T where its dor­mi­to­ries/house­holds were quite over­crowd­ed.

“When Sin­ga­pore re­alised this out­break had hap­pened in the mi­grant com­mu­ni­ty, they re­dou­bled their ef­forts to have a more all-in­clu­sive ap­proach in man­ag­ing the epi­dem­ic and now they have it un­der con­trol again,” Lan­dis added.

He said iden­ti­fy­ing these com­mu­ni­ties, to­geth­er with a high vol­ume of test­ing, some re­stric­tion of move­ment—al­ready im­ple­ment­ed in most Caribbean coun­tries and ap­ply­ing best prac­tices in hy­giene, were some of the prin­ci­ples more Caribbean gov­ern­ments need­ed to think about in the man­age­ment of the epi­dem­ic.

All while main­tain­ing some eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty, which he said, was es­sen­tial oth­er­wise there would be a com­pound­ing of all the so­cial prob­lems emerg­ing with the pan­dem­ic, he not­ed.

He re­it­er­at­ed the im­por­tance of an all-in­clu­sive ap­proach, as no one was safe or ex­empt­ed from the pan­dem­ic.