Soyi­ni Grey

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.”