Samp­son Nan­ton

“We are at war to­day!”

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley put the coun­try on a war-foot­ing against COVID-19 as he de­liv­ered a mes­sage from his res­i­dence hours be­fore the start of new mea­sures to curb the spread of the virus that has al­ready claimed three lives lo­cal­ly.

And ac­cord­ing to the prime min­is­ter, every­one with­in our bor­ders is a sol­dier in this fight against an “in­vis­i­ble en­e­my”.

He be­gan his mes­sage, which last­ed ten min­utes and 37 sec­onds, with ref­er­ence to Memo­r­i­al Park, where the names of T&T na­tion­als who fought in the both World Wars, are in­scribed.

What they fought for, he said, is no dif­fer­ent from what each cit­i­zen is be­ing called up­on to fight for to­day—the peo­ple of our na­tion.

“The dif­fer­ence be­tween this war and those World Wars was that those who picked up arms to de­fend us, car­ried guns, fired bul­lets. The war that we’re fight­ing now is an in­vis­i­ble en­e­my, a mi­cro-pathogen that you will not see with the naked eye but we know it’s there,” he said.

“This pathogen could strike us and it could take days be­fore we know who is a ca­su­al­ty.”

He added: “In those days when the in­struc­tion was giv­en, it was more than like­ly an in­struc­tion that says, ‘To the breach­es, aim fire.’ To­day the in­struc­tions are, ‘Take cov­er’, mean­ing, stay home. Do not con­gre­gate, iso­late and quar­an­tine your­selves,” Dr Row­ley said.

He not­ed that those who fought in the pre­vi­ous wars were se­lect­ed for their strength, height and weight.

“To­day, every sin­gle one of us has to be a sol­dier be­cause the en­e­my can come from any one of us. So we have to be ex­tra care­ful,” he added.

Dr Row­ley told the na­tion that while there are laws in place, “the most wide-rang­ing law in this war is the law of com­mon sense.”

“And as we en­gage, we ad­vise, we re­quest, we sug­gest, we in­struct and we en­force, we ex­pect that all along this jour­ney, com­mon sense will pre­vail,” he said.

He said the main weapon is ba­sic hy­giene which “is not writ­ten in any law.”

Dr Row­ley said the law can­not guar­an­tee that hands will be washed and faces will not be touched.

“Such is the na­ture of the re­sponse to­day go­ing for­ward. That is the an­ti­dote that’s present and un­til a vac­cine is avail­able, it is the best weapon that we have. So please, let com­mon sense pre­vail and let per­son­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty be your con­tri­bu­tion,” he said.

He said the true he­roes in this war are the health care work­ers who are on the front­line fight­ing to save the lives of those af­fect­ed by the virus and do­ing their best to stop the spread.

“Don’t make their ef­forts be in vain. You, to the breach­es, sim­ply have to take cov­er,” he said.

He al­so stressed that per­sons should not leave their homes to ex­er­cise.

“If you want to ex­er­cise, I am sure there is enough space in your homes to ex­er­cise,” he said, adding, “If we say there is a cri­sis and some things have to be giv­en up to over­come this per­il. That is why it is called a cri­sis. That is why it is called a per­il.”

Dr Row­ley con­tin­ued: “In this emer­gency I know it’s not easy to not be able to hug your grand­par­ents and your grand­child but that is what we give up to be safe and to be suc­cess­ful.”

He said that based on the mod­els, it’s ex­pect­ed that in the com­ing weeks, things will get worse with more in­fec­tions and pos­si­bly more deaths.

“What we are try­ing to do is to min­imise those num­bers by our re­sponse and be­hav­iour which sim­ply says, with­draw and iso­late. That is how we will de­feat this in­vis­i­ble en­e­my.”

Dr Row­ley end­ed his state­ment by call­ing on the coun­try to con­tin­ue pray­ing for the na­tion dur­ing this dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od.