The reg­u­lar COVID-19 me­dia re­leas­es from the Min­istry of Health have now ceased af­ter three years, two months, and nine days since the first up­date was is­sued on March 4th, 2020. On May 12th, the Min­istry of Health said as a re­sult of a low lev­el of COVID-19 in cir­cu­la­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go with low lev­els of cas­es, deaths, hos­pi­tal­iza­tions, and pos­i­tiv­i­ty, the press re­leas­es in their cur­rent for­mat would no longer be is­sued.

Be­tween April 29th through May 12th, the sev­en-day rolling av­er­age of COVID-19 cas­es, mean­ing the num­ber of new COVID-19 cas­es record­ed dai­ly dur­ing the sev­en-day-pe­ri­od is 10, down from two weeks ago, when the Min­istry of Health was record­ing 13 cas­es per day on av­er­age, and the low­est rolling av­er­age in over two years, when it was ten on March 22nd, 2021.

With­in the last two weeks, there has on­ly been one COVID-19-re­lat­ed death. The pos­i­tiv­i­ty rate is 6.7 per cent, mean­ing of every pa­tient test­ed at pub­lic and pri­vate health­care fa­cil­i­ties, 6.7 out of every 100 peo­ple were pos­i­tive.

The Min­istry of Health notes that there are no pa­tients in the in­ten­sive care unit and high de­pen­den­cy unit for the sec­ond fort­night­ly pe­ri­od in a row, with an av­er­age of 19 pa­tients in hos­pi­tals across the par­al­lel and hy­brid health­care sys­tems. The hy­brid health­care sys­tem in­cludes fa­cil­i­ties like the Port of Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal and San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, which are now equipped to treat and ward COVID-19 pa­tients with­out trans­fer to the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem that on­ly hous­es COVID-19-pos­i­tive pa­tients.

The Min­istry notes that this da­ta is in­deed en­cour­ag­ing, es­pe­cial­ly with­in an en­vi­ron­ment with very few pub­lic health re­stric­tions at this time.

Over the course of 1,250 COVID-19 me­dia re­leas­es from the Min­istry of Health, T&T has record­ed over 191,000 con­firmed COVID-19 cas­es and 4,391 COVID-19 deaths.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Health, the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion end­ed its de­c­la­ra­tion of COVID-19 as a glob­al health emer­gency on May 5th, 2023, which sig­nalled the end of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Health.

In a state­ment, the Min­istry of Health is re­mind­ing the pub­lic, par­tic­u­lar­ly the vul­ner­a­ble (those with chron­ic dis­eases, the el­der­ly, preg­nant pa­tients, and the un­vac­ci­nat­ed), that they should con­tin­ue to main­tain the prin­ci­ples and prac­tice of good hy­giene as these mea­sures will as­sist in the main­te­nance of our low lev­els of trans­mis­sion of COVID-19 and oth­er in­fec­tious dis­eases.