Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Around 1,000 Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­als are be­ing al­lowed to re­turn home, Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Stu­art Young con­firmed at a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

This would in­clude cruise ship work­ers, pas­sen­gers, Uni­ver­si­ty of West In­dies stu­dents and a T&T am­bas­sador.

Some of the re­turn­ing na­tion­als would be re­quired to pay for their quar­an­tine.

“As the gov­ern­ment, we would love to be able to just open up and bring back all of our na­tion­als or larg­er num­bers of na­tion­als but the num­bers I’ve just told you all about equate to over 850 and to have 850 for the next 14 days as we man­age it, as we mon­i­tor, we be­lieve there may be pos­i­tive cas­es... and we need to be able to man­age it,” he said af­ter list­ing the var­i­ous groups re­turn­ing to T&T.

The ex­er­cise, Young said be­gan this week with a group that ap­plied for ex­emp­tions over a month ago.

“We ex­pect on Fri­day- in two days time, the 12th- about 326 to 360 Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­als to re­turn on the Roy­al Caribbean cruise ship. Right now they’re be­ing con­sol­i­dat­ed in Bar­ba­dos, they’re stock­ing up on sup­plies,” he said.

He not­ed that af­ter ne­go­ti­a­tions, a ded­i­cat­ed ves­sel would be used for the quar­an­tine of all of these na­tion­als.

“When they’ve come in, we’ve made arrange­ments - our health per­son­nel to test every one of the na­tion­als. Those tests would then be put in­to the sys­tem and they would all be quar­an­tined on the ship in sep­a­rate rooms, sep­a­rate cab­ins with their own wash­room fa­cil­i­ties to keep that quar­an­tine safe. They will be mon­i­tored on a dai­ly ba­sis,” he said.

Dur­ing his list­ing, he in­di­cat­ed that some of the re­turn­ing na­tion­als would be pay­ing for their quar­an­tine. How­ev­er, when asked, was un­able at the time to state how many of the to­tal num­ber of re­turn­ing na­tion­als would be foot­ing the cost.

The Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty al­so said a de­ci­sion was tak­en to al­low lo­cal farm work­ers who wish to leave for Cana­da to tem­porar­i­ly work on farms to do so. He said that af­ter con­sul­ta­tions with the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, Faris Al-Rawi, it was de­cid­ed these farm­ers would need to sign an agree­ment that should they chose to re­turn to T&T, they would al­so need to foot the bill for their quar­an­tine pe­ri­od. He said the waiv­er be­ing signed al­so en­sures that the farm­ers are aware that there is cur­rent­ly an out­break of COVID-19 in the Cana­di­an farms and that they would not qual­i­fy for treat­ment in the Cana­di­an health sys­tem which is not free.

“There is go­ing to be a cer­tain in­dem­ni­ty let­ter for each one of these work­ers to sign ac­knowl­edg­ing that they are putting them­selves at risk,” he said.