Bavi­ta Gopaulchan

De­spite a state­ment from Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley that the Gov­ern­ment will con­sid­er lift­ing even more of the coun­try’s COVID-19 re­stric­tions, two health ex­perts be­lieve the Gov­ern­ment should main­tain some de­gree of pro­tec­tion at the bor­ders of en­try.

Some coun­tries, such as the Unit­ed King­dom, have al­ready re­moved their COVID-19 en­try pro­to­cols for trav­ellers. Grena­da is the lat­est coun­try in the Caribbean to an­nounce that it no longer re­quires vis­i­tors to do a COVID test or fill out a health de­c­la­ra­tion form.

Oc­cu­pa­tion­al and En­vi­ron­men­tal Health Spe­cial­ist, Dr San­jiv Paras­ram, be­lieves some pro­to­cols are re­quired in the event a new COVID-19 vari­ant emerges. This, he told Guardian Me­dia, will pre­vent the new strain from en­ter­ing the coun­try.

“There should be some sort of screen­ing be­cause you don’t want to throw the ba­by out of the bath­wa­ter. I would love for peo­ple to still get a test, if peo­ple could do a rapid test, be­cause you don’t want a pos­i­tive per­son on a plane or com­ing through air­ports be­cause that pro­vides a hub of in­fec­tion,” Paras­ram not­ed.

In Trinidad and To­ba­go, all trav­ellers must sub­mit a neg­a­tive PCR test re­sult, tak­en 72 hours pri­or to ar­rival in the coun­try, via the TTrav­el Pass.

Un­vac­ci­nat­ed or par­tial­ly vac­ci­nat­ed per­sons are re­quired to quar­an­tine for 14 days at an ap­proved state-su­per­vised ho­tel, at their ex­pense. If there is no ap­proved, state-su­per­vised ac­com­mo­da­tion avail­able, the pas­sen­ger will not be ap­proved for en­try.

Ac­cord­ing to Health Eco­nom­ic Spe­cial­ist, Pro­fes­sor Har­i­ha­ran Seethara­man, test­ing is im­por­tant and should re­main a re­quire­ment even if it’s a rapid anti­gen test.

“We need to be cau­tious about let­ting every­body in­to the coun­try be­cause there is ev­i­dence in is­land coun­tries where the mi­grant pop­u­la­tion bring in a small spike with new vari­ants, so we should have some sort of re­strict­ed en­try like what we have now with the trav­el pass,” Seethara­man said.

“I would not sup­port any dra­con­ian mea­sures at this point in time. We need to re­lax and open up the econ­o­my. To­ba­go is tourism so we shouldn’t be turn­ing away peo­ple but we must al­so have per­son­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty by main­tain­ing some mea­sures un­til we are in a much more com­fort­able place in the pan­dem­ic.”

Dr Paras­ram warned that while “we are in a far bet­ter po­si­tion than we were a cou­ple months ago,” the coun­try still need­ed to be wary of the Omi­cron vari­ant.

“We still have to be care­ful of Omi­cron, which is caus­ing a very dead­ly wave in Hong Kong right now, so you have to look at every­thing holis­ti­cal­ly,” he said.

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