The 19,000 Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­als and oth­ers who’ve re­cent­ly re­turned from abroad must stay put!

This was Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young’s ur­gent ap­peal on Tues­day af­ter med­ical au­thor­i­ties con­firmed that one lo­cal per­son had con­tract­ed COVID-19 from a fam­i­ly mem­ber who’d re­cent­ly trav­elled.

How­ev­er, dur­ing a me­dia brief­ing at the Min­istry of Health yes­ter­day, Young dis­missed talk of “com­mu­ni­ty spread.”

COVID cas­es in­creased from 51 on Mon­day to 57 on Tues­day. Chief Med­ical of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said the lat­est case was T&T’s first case which wasn’t di­rect­ly linked to trav­el. He said it in­volved some­one liv­ing in close prox­im­i­ty to an im­port­ed case. All cas­es are im­port­ed, save for this new case which arose from pri­ma­ry con­tact with an im­port­ed case, Paras­ram added.

Fol­low­ing this lat­est de­vel­op­ment, Young said T&T had to avoid com­mu­ni­ty spread. As such, he called on the 19,000-odd na­tion­als who ar­rived in T&T re­cent­ly to self-quar­an­tine. He said they haven’t been do­ing so and there have been re­ports from all over about this.

“We asked for self-quar­an­tine but they’re not in self-quar­an­tine. Stay put, please. We didn’t seek manda­to­ry quar­an­tine, but you can see how one per­son can spread this among us,” Young added.

“There’s no com­mu­ni­ty spread. The Health Min­istry’s re­lease stat­ed the new per­son was a pri­ma­ry con­tact with­in the house­hold of the per­son who’d trav­elled—it doesn’t mean com­mu­ni­ty spread.”

Young ad­vised peo­ple not to leave home un­less they have es­sen­tial busi­ness, in­clud­ing go­ing to the gro­cery.

“The re­spon­si­ble peo­ple in T&T are heed­ing our calls but with every im­por­ta­tion of peo­ple, it ex­pands the risk.”

Young said all mea­sures tak­en and which Gov­ern­ment has ap­pealed to peo­ple to heed, are to pro­tect “you the pub­lic,” not­ing in South Ko­rea one per­son’s in­fec­tion led to spread in 80 per cent of that coun­try.

“Right now we’re in a good place and the on­ly way to stay there is for every per­son to take per­son­al so­cial dis­tanc­ing de­ci­sions. It’ll con­tin­ue chang­ing if we don’t beat the ‘curve’ in this,” he said.

He said work­places were tak­ing de­ci­sions on how work is done but po­lice, health care and oth­er es­sen­tial work­ers con­tin­ue on the job. On pub­lic ser­vants and min­istries, Young said staff ro­ta­tions have start­ed and so­cial dis­tanc­ing pro­to­cols were im­por­tant. Gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to take ad­vice on what needs to be im­ple­ment­ed to min­imise risk, he said, but the sys­tem and es­sen­tial ser­vices still need to func­tion.

“We recog­nise with peo­ple los­ing jobs, we need to have out­reach in so­cial as­pects of help­ing peo­ple,” Young said.