As the coun­try’s COVID-19 out­look hit a record high in terms of new cas­es per 24-hour pe­ri­od, at 402 and sev­en ad­di­tion­al deaths, which pushed the tal­ly to 203 over­all, fears con­tin­ue to cir­cu­late that the na­tion’s hos­pi­tals are be­ing over­whelmed.

Inch­ing clos­er to the 4,000-mark as to­tal ac­tive cas­es reached 3,783 up to 4 pm on Sat­ur­day, pub­lic of­fi­cials have con­tin­ued to adopt dras­tic ac­tions to force per­sons to stop con­gre­gat­ing.

In a nev­er-be­fore-seen move to pre­vent mem­bers of the pub­lic from ven­tur­ing on­to the cap­i­tal’s busiest lim­ing strip— the Bri­an Lara Prom­e­nade, the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion on Sat­ur­day roped off the area which runs from east to west with cau­tion tape and cor­doned off the area with bar­ri­cades.

COVID-19 cases disaggregated be age and sex, Trinidad and Tobago, Jul 20, 2020- May 6, 2021

MINISTRY OF HEALTH

In the Min­istry of Health’s dai­ly up­date at 4 pm, of­fi­cials re­port­ed that a to­tal of 331 peo­ple had been hos­pi­talised.

And with 391 peo­ple at state quar­an­tine sites, the min­istry said a to­tal of 3,014 peo­ple re­mained in home self-iso­la­tion, with 46 in step-down fa­cil­i­ties.

This is the sec­ond time sev­en deaths have been record­ed in a 24-hour pe­ri­od since the pan­dem­ic be­gan in March 2020. An­oth­er sev­en fa­tal­i­ties were al­so record­ed on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2020.

Mean­while, Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith al­so shut down the West Bees Su­per­mar­ket in Diego Mar­tin on Sat­ur­day for fail­ing to ad­here to COVID-19 reg­u­la­tions. He said he was left with no choice af­ter they failed to heed the ad­vice to in­stall so­cial dis­tance mark­ers to keep cus­tomers apart.

Grif­fith is­sued a warn­ing to the own­ers on Fri­day af­ter he vis­it­ed and found close to 100 per­sons packed un­der a tent. Up­on ar­riv­ing on Sat­ur­day, Grif­fith "found cus­tomers packed to­geth­er, tighter than chan­na in a dou­bles."

The CoP said the gro­cery will be al­lowed to re­open on­ly when it does what is re­quired. He has promised that greater at­ten­tion will be paid to in­creas­ing foot pa­trols in and around busi­ness­es to en­sure crowd con­trol mea­sures are fol­lowed.