Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Trinidad and To­ba­go has now record­ed over 100 COVID-19 deaths since its first in­fec­tion was record­ed al­most eight months ago on March 12.

The lat­est deaths record­ed yes­ter­day by the Min­istry of Health were an el­der­ly male and fe­male with pre-ex­ist­ing med­ical con­di­tions and one fe­male. Their deaths took the toll up to 101, 93 of which oc­curred over the coun­try’s sec­ond phase of in­fec­tion which be­gan on Ju­ly 20 with case 139. The first death lo­cal­ly was record­ed on March 25.

Com­ment­ing on the un­for­tu­nate mile­stone short­ly af­ter the up­date was giv­en, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh told Guardian Me­dia it was an­oth­er wake-up call.

“My con­do­lences go out to all the fam­i­lies. With each death, a fam­i­ly los­es a loved one. It’s not a sta­tis­tic to us,” he said.

“I am hop­ing num­ber 100 would res­onate with peo­ple who are still not tak­ing this virus se­ri­ous­ly and are still not do­ing the sim­ple things like wear­ing masks, so­cial dis­tanc­ing and so on.”

He urged the pub­lic to ad­here to the health pro­to­cols and keep their “home en­vi­ron­ment - es­pe­cial­ly if there are el­der­ly peo­ple - free from vis­i­tors. Don’t let the virus come in­to your home and in­fect the el­der­ly.”

The ma­jor­i­ty of fa­tal­i­ties from the virus have so far been el­der­ly, male and those with pre-ex­ist­ing med­ical con­di­tions.

His ap­peal comes as three ma­jor events are in cit­i­zens’ sights - Hal­loween, Di­vali and Christ­mas and New Years - ac­tiv­i­ties which en­tail vis­it­ing house­holds.

But Deyals­ingh warned, “This year has to be a year where we give up these things oth­er­wise the death toll will con­tin­ue to go up.”

De­spite the in­crease in deaths, Deyals­ingh said there is some light at the end of the tun­nel - a de­crease in the av­er­age num­ber of cas­es be­ing re­port­ed dai­ly.

“That’s a good thing to be cel­e­brat­ed but we must con­tin­ue with the pub­lic health mea­sures,” he said

“Some peo­ple are in­ter­pret­ing this drop in cas­es to mean I don’t have to wear a mask, I don’t have to so­cial dis­tance. But as we move for­ward, we have to con­tin­ue with the sim­ple pub­lic health mea­sures as slight­ly in­con­ve­nient as they may be. “

The Min­istry of Health con­firmed 59 ad­di­tion­al in­fec­tions yes­ter­day but not­ed this does not rep­re­sent an in­crease over a 24-hour pe­ri­od, as it in­clud­ed sam­ple re­sults tak­en be­tween Oc­to­ber 18-20.

The num­ber of ac­tive cas­es de­creased yes­ter­day to 1,459 af­ter 74 peo­ple were re­leased from the min­istry’s care - 10 were dis­charged from pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ties while 64 were re­leased from home self-iso­la­tion as re­cov­ered com­mu­ni­ty cas­es. Of the re­main­ing ac­tive cas­es, 1,334 are in home self-iso­la­tion.

The re­leased pa­tients brought the to­tal num­ber of re­cov­ered pa­tients up to 3,832. There were 75 pa­tients at hos­pi­tals, 50 at step-down/tran­si­tion­al fa­cil­i­ties and 280 in state quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties.