Since March 13 when schools were shut down due to the dis­cov­ery of the first pos­i­tive COVID-19 case, cit­i­zens of T&T have looked to­wards our gov­ern­ment for sound lead­er­ship dur­ing this life- al­ter­ing and daunt­ing pe­ri­od. Al­though we sym­pa­thise with those af­fect­ed and mourn the eight lives lost, we can­not help but ac­knowl­edge the suc­cess of those in charge in pre­vent­ing a cat­a­stroph­ic first wave of out­breaks. I ap­plaud the health­care work­ers who have served tire­less­ly dur­ing this dif­fi­cult time.

For­tu­nate­ly, we have a Prime Min­is­ter who recog­nis­es the au­thor­i­ty held by health pro­fes­sion­als in this re­gard and at­trib­ut­es the suc­cess to a de­tailed and metic­u­lous sci­en­tif­ic ap­proach based on ev­i­dence such as the ben­e­fits of so­cial dis­tanc­ing and wear­ing of face masks.

Ac­cord­ing to Dr Kei­th Row­ley, “We had with­in T&T, a pop­u­la­tion of pub­lic ser­vants and their as­so­ciates who were able to give us the ap­pro­pri­ate ad­vice and the gov­ern­ment took the po­si­tion that we will make our de­ci­sions based on the sci­ence and trust the pro­fes­sion­al­ism of our health­care pro­fes­sion­als, and I must say it has worked very well for us. The gov­ern­ment would con­tin­ue to make de­ci­sions based on the sci­ence.”

See­ing the suc­cess of al­low­ing sci­ence to lead the COVID-19 Ac­tion Plan, the gov­ern­ment would do well to let sci­en­tists and ex­perts lead in con­fronting the oth­er key chal­lenges fac­ing the coun­try. These in­clude wors­en­ing ef­fects of cli­mate change and is­sues con­cern­ing eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion.

If the gov­ern­ment ex­tends their trust in sci­ence to pro­fes­sion­als bat­tling these oth­er chal­lenges, suc­cess­ful ac­tion plans will be de­vel­oped for all ar­eas: from stim­u­lat­ing lo­cal pro­duc­tion, to in­creas­ing sup­port for lo­cal farm­ers and im­prov­ing man­age­ment of our nat­ur­al, eco­nom­i­cal­ly vi­able re­sources.

This will be a ben­e­fi­cial ap­proach in lead­ing T&T’s thrust to­wards eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion and greater fi­nan­cial in­de­pen­dence.

Han­nah Lochan

West­moor­ings