Raphael John-Lall

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said yes­ter­day that the process to get strand­ed na­tion­als back home will speed up fol­low­ing im­ple­men­ta­tion of a new lib­er­alised ex­emp­tion pol­i­cy. There are now two cat­e­gories of coun­tries—high risk/medi­um and low risk—from which the el­i­gi­bil­i­ty of na­tion­als to re­turn home will be de­ter­mined, he an­nounced at yes­ter­day’s Min­istry of Health vir­tu­al me­dia con­fer­ence.

The cat­e­gories are based on World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) guide­lines. High risk/medi­um cat­e­go­ry are those where there is clus­ter or com­mu­ni­ty spread, while the low-risk cat­e­go­ry in­cludes spo­radic spread.

For na­tion­als re­turn­ing from low-risk coun­tries, the fol­low­ing will ap­ply:

• They must not have been in a high-risk coun­try for 14 days pri­or to ar­riv­ing in T&T via a low-risk coun­try.

• Na­tion­als com­ing from a low-risk coun­try must pro­duce a neg­a­tive PCR COVID-19 test for the 72 hours pe­ri­od be­fore en­ter­ing T&T.

Once the above two re­quire­ments are sat­is­fied, the re­turn­ing na­tion­als will be re­quired to sign a form to be quar­an­tined at home for 14 days.

For those re­turn­ing from high/medi­um risk coun­tries, the fol­low­ing will ap­ply:

• They will be state quar­an­tined for sev­en days up­on ar­rival will al­so be swabbed up­on ar­rival in T&T.

• In sev­en days, if they are not pos­i­tive or show symp­toms, they can self-quar­an­tine at home for the rest of the quar­an­tine pe­ri­od.

• If a na­tion­al tests pos­i­tive, the state will de­ter­mine if that per­son will be hos­pi­talised.

Young said as of Fri­day, the to­tal num­ber of ex­emp­tions grant­ed for na­tion­als to re­turn home was 3,563. In ad­di­tion, 1,702 na­tion­als in the Unit­ed States have ap­plied to re­turn to T&T. There have been 372 ap­pli­ca­tions from Cana­da, 307 ap­pli­ca­tions from the Unit­ed King­dom and 103 from Bar­ba­dos.

He added: “The pop­u­la­tion can ap­pre­ci­ate from to­day if per­sons are found not wear­ing their masks in pub­lic places, the TTPS will now be is­su­ing tick­ets. Be warned.”

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said peo­ple who can­not use a face mask for med­ical rea­sons have the op­tion of wear­ing face shields or oth­er cov­er­ings, once it cov­ers the nose, mouth and chin.

“This will al­low you to breathe freely and gives you a high de­gree of pro­tec­tion, not as much as a mask, but some pro­tec­tion is bet­ter than none. You can ex­er­cise with this. You can go out in pub­lic with this. It is not a reg­u­la­tion to force you to wear a mask but to guide be­hav­iour to cov­er your face,” he said

Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram fur­ther ad­vised that any­one who for health rea­sons can­not wear a face cov­er­ing should have a let­ter from a doc­tor.