The coun­try’s COVID-19 num­bers soared from nine to 49 overnight Fri­day and the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram is ex­pect­ing that num­ber to rise. The 40 new cas­es all came from the 68 cruise ship pas­sen­gers who were quar­an­tined at Camp Ba­lan­dra in To­co af­ter re­turn­ing home on Wednes­day.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh says even with the jump in nov­el Coro­n­avirus cas­es from nine to 49, there is no drain on Trinidad and To­ba­go’s ex­ist­ing health­care sys­tem.

For­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj says he nev­er threat­ened lit­i­ga­tion in a let­ter to Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh ask­ing the Gov­ern­ment to look in­to un­suit­able ac­com­mo­da­tions pro­vid­ed to the 68 peo­ple who were quar­an­tined in Ba­lan­dra af­ter re­turn­ing from a Caribbean cruise.

The re­main­ing pas­sen­gers from the ill-fat­ed Caribbean cruise still quar­an­tined at the Sev­enth Day Ad­ven­tist Camp, Camp Ba­lan­dra, are said to be hap­py and re­laxed.

Mem­bers of the pub­lic who are tra­di­tion­al­ly ac­cus­tomed to vis­it­ing pro­duce mar­kets every week­end are now be­ing asked to stag­ger their ar­rival times to these fa­cil­i­ties in an at­tempt to min­imise the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

The ma­jor­i­ty of bars across the coun­try re­mained closed yes­ter­day, fol­low­ing Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s warn­ing on Wednes­day that own­ers who fail to com­ply dur­ing the COVID-19 re­sponse risk los­ing their li­cences.

On the heels of the Prime Min­is­ter’s call to lim­it gath­er­ings to ten peo­ple or less, the Ch­aguara­mas De­vel­op­ment Au­thor­i­ty (CDA) has closed ac­cess to the penin­su­la’s ma­jor beach­es at Mac­queripe, Williams Bay and Chagville.

Scores of peo­ple gath­ered at the Bethel ‘The House of God’ church in Freeport on Thurs­day night for its an­nu­al memo­r­i­al ser­vice, de­spite in­struc­tions by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley that there should be no more than ten peo­ple in pub­lic gath­er­ings.

Dai­ly life for Ba­lan­dra’s newest res­i­dents ap­peared to be qui­et and unas­sum­ing on Thurs­day morn­ing.

As one of the nat­ur­al won­ders of Trinidad and To­ba­go, Mara­cas Beach is a place peo­ple of­ten go to in or­der to for­get their wor­ries.

A con­tact trac­ing un­der­tak­en on one of the coun­try’s nine com­firmed COVID-19 cas­es has re­vealed that the in­di­vid­ual had con­tact with 66 peo­ple while car­ry­ing the virus.

Caribbean Air­lines is en­sur­ing that they are ob­serv­ing all pro­to­cols re­lat­ed to the nov­el coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) and "will con­tin­ue to work close­ly with port au­thor­i­ty health of­fi­cials to not on­ly safe­guard their crew but the wel­fare of pas­sen­gers."