Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Min­istry of Health of­fi­cials are card­ed to meet with the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to­day to dis­cuss the is­sue of the re­open­ing schools, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said yes­ter­day.

“We’re hav­ing a dis­cus­sion with the min­istry - that’s the Min­istry of Health and Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion called by the Ho­n­ourable Min­is­ter on Thurs­day morn­ing to dis­cuss what is go­ing to hap­pen with the school sit­u­a­tion,” Paras­ram said dur­ing yes­ter­day’s vir­tu­al COVID-19 press con­fer­ence.
He, how­ev­er, did not go in­to any fur­ther de­tails to avoid pre­empt­ing the dis­cus­sion. 
Schools were closed one day af­ter the first case was re­port­ed on March 13, 2020, by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley. Vir­tu­al class­es, which be­gan in Sep­tem­ber, con­tin­ue to fill the void left by phys­i­cal class­es.
Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor Dr Av­ery Hinds again not­ed that cas­es for 2021 were on an up­ward tra­jec­to­ry. 

“The new cas­es per day are inch­ing up­wards. If you look at the num­ber of new cas­es per week, you’d see that in the last three com­plet­ed cal­en­dar or epi­demi­o­log­ic weeks, we’d have had a steady in­crease from 58 cas­es in the last week of 2020 to 82 cas­es in the first week of 2021 and 126 in this last com­plet­ed week,” Hinds said. 

He re­it­er­at­ed that it is a con­cern­ing de­vel­op­ment and urged the pub­lic to avoid any sort of gath­er­ings or con­gre­ga­tions. 

The rise in cas­es comes as no sur­prise to min­istry of­fi­cials, as they an­tic­i­pat­ed it fol­low­ing the Christ­mas and New Year’s fes­tiv­i­ties. Paras­ram even not­ed pre­vi­ous­ly that they ex­pect to wit­ness the full im­pact of these cel­e­bra­tions on the virus’ spread by the end of Jan­u­ary. 
It’s al­so why the cur­rent form of the Pub­lic Health Reg­u­la­tions was ex­tend­ed for a sec­ond time ear­li­er this week.

“The main­te­nance of the sta­tus quo is based on what has hap­pened over the Christ­mas sea­son and what we saw by way of pub­lic health mea­sures not be­ing ad­hered to. The num­bers, as Dr Hinds has said, con­tin­ues to rise so, ex­pec­tant­ly, we won’t be able to re­lax any­thing at this point at least,” Paras­ram said.