Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

An­oth­er el­der­ly man be­came T&T lat­est COVID-19 fa­tal­i­ty yes­ter­day, ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Health, bring­ing the to­tal death num­ber of deaths from the virus lo­cal­ly to 84. The min­istry said the man had pre-ex­ist­ing med­ical con­di­tions.

There were al­so 41 ad­di­tion­al cas­es record­ed yes­ter­day from some 309 sam­ples sub­mit­ted for test­ing to the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA), UWI and oth­er lo­cal sites. This brought the to­tal num­ber of in­fec­tions record­ed in the coun­try to 4,887.

De­spite the new cas­es, the to­tal ac­tive dropped to 1,782 af­ter 59 peo­ple were re­leased from the min­istry’s care. Sev­en were dis­charged from pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ties while 52 were re­leased from home iso­la­tion as re­cov­ered com­mu­ni­ty cas­es. This makes 3,010 peo­ple who have re­cov­ered from the virus lo­cal­ly.

Speak­ing dur­ing the min­istry’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said from to­day, there will on­ly be one up­date re­leased per day at 4 pm.

“We think it’s a sim­pler graph­ic to fol­low. There are icons which will res­onate with each cat­e­go­ry and from to­mor­row at 4, we would be go­ing to­wards this for­mat of press re­lease,” Paras­ram said.

He said the re­leas­es will con­tain most of the same in­for­ma­tion as the up­dates the coun­try had grown ac­cus­tomed to since March. One dif­fer­ence, he not­ed, will be the cat­e­gories for “num­ber of per­sons dis­charged from pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ties” and “re­cov­ered com­mu­ni­ty cas­es,” which will now be amal­ga­mat­ed in­to one cat­e­go­ry - “to­tal re­cov­ered cas­es.”

This is not the first time the min­istry has amend­ed its up­date sched­ule. At its peak in the ear­ly stages of COVID-19 in­fec­tions lo­cal­ly, the min­istry pro­vid­ed up­dates twice dai­ly. Dur­ing the peak of the first phase of in­fec­tions, up­dates were pro­vid­ed three times dai­ly and was sub­se­quent­ly re­duced to twice dai­ly af­ter there was a lull in re­port­ed cas­es.

How­ev­er, Paras­ram not­ed that ad­di­tion­al break­down of cas­es and in­for­ma­tion could be ac­cessed via the min­istry’s web­site.

“The en­tire press re­lease as we now send it out will al­so be avail­able on our web­site so that ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion can be got­ten for the step-downs, for the quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties and fur­ther break­downs can be pro­vid­ed in that for­mat,” he said.