Yes­ter­day, Trinidad and To­ba­go reached an­oth­er grim mile­stone in the COVID-19 bat­tle it did not want to at­tain — 1,000 deaths. Dr Dhiyan Ma­habir and prison of­fi­cer Nixon Lokai, who were on the front­lines in their var­i­ous sec­tors of work, were the lives that took the toll to the un­for­tu­nate mark.

Over the past year and a half in the fight to save lives and liveli­hoods from the rav­ages of the dis­ease, there would have been many chal­lenges which the front­line health­care work­ers had to over­come. As med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, how­ev­er, there is no doubt they would have been trau­ma­tised by the suf­fer­ing of their pa­tients and un­for­tu­nate loss of lives.

For his part, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh yes­ter­day said he was was sat­is­fied with how Gov­ern­ment has re­spond­ed to the pan­dem­ic.

The ju­ry, of course, is still out on this, giv­en that we have fared sig­nif­i­cant­ly worse in this sec­ond wave of the virus than we did in the first, even with the dead­ly Delta vari­ant still to reach our shores.

On the pos­i­tive side, for the most part the par­ralell health sys­tem set up to deal with COVID pa­tients has not been over­whelmed as has been seen in oth­er coun­tries.

But on the oth­er side, the Gov­ern­ment's ap­par­ent less than vig­or­ous ap­proach to ac­quir­ing vac­cines ear­ly on, per­haps in the face of suc­cess with fight­ing it in last year's first wave, may have ul­ti­mate­ly cost the coun­try an op­por­tu­ni­ty to be at a dif­fer­ent stage now.

With more than one forced na­tion­al lock­down and an on­go­ing State of Emer­gency as a re­sult of rag­ing cas­es, it is per­haps our late at­tempt to ac­quire the vac­cines need­ed to in­oc­u­late the pop­u­la­tion which has led to the cur­rent un­de­sir­able sit­u­a­tion with­in the econ­o­my.

In that re­gard, the re­cent ar­rival of 800,000 Sinopharm vac­cines and the promise of more ahead, in­clud­ing the Pfiz­er jab in­tend­ed for use on the sec­ondary school pop­ual­tion, of­fers the chance to sig­nif­i­cant­ly speed up the in­oc­u­la­tion process. Still, herd im­mu­ni­ty, set by Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram at 900,000 peo­ple ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, is well off at this stage. As of yes­ter­day, on­ly 174,992 peo­ple had been ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed and an­oth­er 262,976 had re­ceived a first dose.

A light on the hori­zon, how­ev­er, has been the Health Min­istry's de­ci­sion to op­er­a­tionalise re­gion­al health cen­tres as vac­ci­na­tion sites, ful­ly in­cor­po­rate the pri­vate sec­tor in the mass vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve and im­ple­ment dri­ve-through sites to ex­pe­dite the process.

How­ev­er, the onus re­mains on the pub­lic to go out and ac­cess the vac­cines. In­deed, with the process still a vol­un­tary one, the herd im­mu­ni­ty tar­get may nev­er be re­alised, leav­ing many cit­i­zens still ex­posed to the dis­ease. Sci­en­tif­ic ev­i­dence has shown that tak­ing the jab, while not a cure, sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­proves one's chances of fight­ing off se­vere at­tacks and even death. This me­dia house thus be­lieves that the ben­e­fits of tak­ing vac­cines far out­weigh the neg­a­tives. All that if left then, is the pub­lic's co­op­er­a­tion in ac­cess­ing the vac­cines and ad­her­ing to the health pro­to­cols there­after to en­sure COVID is kept at bay.