Parts of South­west Trinidad will be with­out a pipe-borne wa­ter sup­ply un­til tonight, as emer­gency re­pairs are car­ried out on the Granville Wa­ter Treat­ment Plant.

With an­oth­er death record­ed last night, bring­ing the COVID-19 death count to 6, and three ad­di­tion­al con­firmed cas­es lead­ing to a new to­tal of 97, the Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar SC says there is ur­gent need for in­creased test­ing to pre­vent dead­ly spread.

A Min­istry of Health map dis­play­ing the com­mu­ni­ties from which con­firmed COVID-19 cas­es came has al­so re­vealed how easy it is for those per­sons, as well as peo­ple they may have come in­to con­tact with, to spread the virus across the coun­try.

Posthu­mous test­ing of COVID-19 cas­es is not be­ing con­duct­ed in Trinidad and To­ba­go, even if a pa­tient is sus­pect­ed to have died from the virus, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said Thursday.

On De­cem­ber 31, 2019, the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) was in­formed of a clus­ter of cas­es of pneu­mo­nia of un­known cause de­tect­ed in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of Chi­na that would lat­er be iden­ti­fied as a new virus; a coro­n­avirus (CoV) which would lat­er be called COVID-19.

Fish­er­men op­er­at­ing in the Fe­lic­i­ty area told Guardian Me­dia that the rise in COVID-19 cas­es has re­sult­ed in a large num­ber of con­sumers choos­ing to do with­out the prod­uct dur­ing the Lenten sea­son when sales would have been usu­al­ly high.

Since the COVID-19 out­break was deemed a pan­dem­ic on March 12, peo­ple all around the world and even here at home have been con­tribut­ing to lim­it­ing the spread.

By ear­ly next week, the new­ly con­struct­ed Ari­ma Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal will be ready for the ad­mit­tance of COVID-19 pa­tients.

Mov­ing to quell pub­lic out­cry as the gov­ern­ment moves to re­lease 388 pris­on­ers from the na­tion’s pris­ons, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi yes­ter­day as­sured that all pris­on­ers will be med­ical­ly checked be­fore any re­lease takes place.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go As­so­ci­a­tion of So­cial Work­ers (TTASW) has launched a hot­line ser­vice for cit­i­zens need­ing psy­cho-so­cial sup­port dur­ing the cur­rent COVID-19 out­break in this coun­try.

In­ves­ti­ga­tions are con­tin­u­ing in­to a dou­ble mur­der which oc­curred in Mor­vant on Wednes­day night.

One mem­ber of a group of T&T cit­i­zens was left strand­ed in Suri­name be­cause of this coun­try’s on­go­ing trav­el re­stric­tions due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic may still re­ceive an ex­emp­tion from Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young to re­turn home.