It took just 12 days for the num­ber of con­firmed COVID-19 cas­es in T&T to sky­rock­et from one to 57. Yes­ter­day alone, five new cas­es were re­port­ed. This is a trend that is caus­ing a great deal of un­ease, as it is proof of how eas­i­ly this strain of coro­n­avirus can spread in the com­mu­ni­ty if peo­ple don’t heed the re­peat­ed ap­peals to ex­er­cise per­son­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.

The four lat­est COVID-19 cas­es com­prised three peo­ple with his­to­ries of re­cent trav­el and one per­son who had con­tact with a per­son with a his­to­ry of re­cent trav­el. Two were on the cruise ship Cos­ta Favolosa but were sep­a­rate from the group of 68 na­tion­als from that ves­sel who re­turned to the coun­try last week and were im­me­di­ate­ly quar­an­tined at a fa­cil­i­ty in Ba­lan­dra.

If there are any pos­i­tive sides to the COVID-19 out­break in T&T, they in­clude the fact that the ma­jor­i­ty of cas­es are mild, there have been no fa­tal­i­ties and the sit­u­a­tion is be­ing well man­aged with­in the pub­lic health sys­tem. So far, there is no ev­i­dence of com­mu­ni­ty spread—an­oth­er small bit of good news.

The bad news is that the worst of this pan­dem­ic is still ahead and with T&T now seem­ing to surge ahead of neigh­bour­ing Caribbean coun­tries with the num­ber of cas­es record­ed here, cit­i­zens can’t af­ford to let down their guard.

The rate at which cas­es are sur­fac­ing among re­cent­ly re­turned na­tion­als should be enough of a warn­ing to the en­tire na­tion to ex­er­cise ex­treme cau­tion with hy­giene and day-to-day in­ter­ac­tions.

Over­all, there have been quite a few dra­mat­ic de­vel­op­ments since that first case on March 12. As the coun­try was in­formed by the Min­istry of Health, that pa­tient was a 52-year-old man who had re­cent­ly trav­elled to Switzer­land and self-iso­lat­ed on his re­turn to T&T be­fore he be­gan ex­pe­ri­enc­ing symp­toms. A day lat­er the sec­ond case, a 66-year-old man, was ad­mit­ted to a pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ty and two more were con­firmed on the night of March 15.

Since then, the pub­lic health sec­tor has been in full COVID-19 mode, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the spike on March 21 when 40 more cas­es were con­firmed, all of them from among 68 na­tion­als who had left for the cruise on the Cos­ta Favolosa on March 5.

These are just some of the de­vel­op­ments in less than a fort­night that have brought this coun­try to a state of near lock­down. And it is far from over.

In Wuhan, Chi­na, which was ground ze­ro for this rapid­ly spread­ing pan­dem­ic, there are promis­ing ear­ly signs that the sit­u­a­tion is fi­nal­ly un­der con­trol, and that is af­ter eight weeks of com­plete lock­down and a se­ries of strin­gent mea­sure to lim­it the virus’ spread.

As of to­day, T&T is on­ly 13 days in­to its COVID-19 ex­pe­ri­ence with the like­li­hood that the sit­u­a­tion will get worse be­fore it gets bet­ter. It will be a long road ahead.