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Thursday, July 10, 2025

Beachgoer thanks blessings before last minute lockdown

by

Soyini Gray
1547 days ago
20210414
Friends play in the sand at Maracas Beach last month.

Friends play in the sand at Maracas Beach last month.

Anisto Alves

Mere hours af­ter the Min­is­ter of Health an­nounced that beach would once again be close to the pub­lic, the lucky few who made it on this most un­ex­pect­ed last day were count­ing their bless­ings.

Guardian Me­dia caught up with Dale Per­sad just as he was re­turn­ing to his spot, shark and bake in hand. He said get­ting to the beach, in the nick of time, made him feel “great”.

“Fun­ny enough I haven’t been to the beach since the last lock­down, “ he said.

“On­ly this morn­ing I tell my wife, let’s go for a lit­tle dri­ve to Mara­cas, eat some bake and shark and take a lit­tle dip in the wa­ter,” he added,

He chalks it up to luck. But he has mixed feel­ings about the clo­sure of the beach. He is not cer­tain that the facts war­rant such a move.

At yes­ter­day’s Min­istry of Health COVID-19 brief­ing, when the new rules were an­nounced, the Health Min­is­ter draw ref­er­ence to the na­tion­al co­or­di­na­tor for COVID-19 and the Tho­racic Med­ical Di­rec­tor at Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal Dr Michelle Trot­man who spoke ear­li­er of the need to re­duce pub­lic con­gre­ga­tion.

Most go to the beach with oth­ers. Stay­ing in close quar­ters with them, on the sand, in the wa­ter or wait­ing for food. Those gath­er­ings are what the min­istry is try­ing to dis­cour­age.

In re­cent weeks, the num­ber of new COVID cas­es have in­creased sig­nif­i­cant­ly.

Ra­dio an­nounc­er Taquile Des Vi­gnes was re­signed to beach­es be­ing closed, but the news about in-house din­ing in restau­rants, bars and cin­e­mas sur­prised him.

While he ac­cept­ed that the de­ci­sion was a nec­es­sary one, and he re­spect­ed that it was be­ing done for the na­tion­al in­ter­est, he had to ad­mit not be­ing hap­py to face ad­di­tion­al lim­its to re­cent free­doms in the next three weeks.

“No, we can not, it done hard al­ready!” Des Vi­gnes jokes. “But, if we have to go through this to make it bet­ter in the fu­ture we will try to hold strain to get through this,” he added.

Man­ag­er at Pan­cho’s a pop­u­lar bar in Port- of- Spain Kevin Yara echoed those sen­ti­ments.

He said, “It go­ing to be re­al­ly hard to cov­er costs with every­thing as it is but we have to try. We have to tight­en our belt and put our best foot for­ward.”

Al­most im­me­di­ate­ly Movi­eTowne is­sued a state­ment say­ing that their cin­e­mas will be closed for the next three weeks.

When con­tact­ed for a re­sponse own­er Derek Chin said sim­ply, re­main­ing open made “no eco­nom­ic sense.”


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