Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The Gov­ern­ment has added fur­ther health re­stric­tions for a lim­it­ed pe­ri­od as COVID-19 cas­es con­tin­ue to climb.

Be­gin­ning to­day are the pro­hi­bi­tion of pub­lic gath­er­ings for con­certs or en­ter­tain­ment, the re­in­state­ment of a ro­ta­tion­al shift sys­tem for the Pub­lic Ser­vice, which must now work at 50 per cent ca­pac­i­ty, the re­duc­tion of con­gre­ga­tion sizes at places of wor­ship from 50 per cent to 25 per cent ca­pac­i­ty and the lim­it­ing of wed­dings and fu­ner­als to 10 peo­ple.

The mea­sures came short­ly af­ter the Prime Min­is­ter con­vened a meet­ing yes­ter­day morn­ing with Min­istry of Health and Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cials fol­low­ing a re­cent spike in cas­es.

The mea­sures, along with those im­ple­ment­ed last week, will be en­forced un­til May 16.

On Wednes­day last week, the Gov­ern­ment re­in­sti­tut­ed bans on vis­its to beach­es and in-house din­ing and re­duced the num­ber of peo­ple al­lowed to gath­er in pub­lic places to five.

On April 1, it al­so re­in­sti­tut­ed the ban on con­tact and team sports. All these mea­sures rep­re­sent the sec­ond time the Gov­ern­ment had to re­in­sti­tute re­stric­tions to treat ris­ing cas­es af­ter bring­ing them un­der con­trol.

The first time mea­sures were reim­ple­ment­ed since the pan­dem­ic be­gan in March 2020 was on Au­gust 17, 2020, af­ter cas­es soared and the coun­try went from spo­radic trans­mis­sion to com­mu­ni­ty spread fol­low­ing the Gen­er­al Elec­tion. 

“We tried to strike the prop­er bal­ance to re­duce con­gre­ga­tion...as much as pos­si­ble,” Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said dur­ing the an­nounce­ment at yes­ter­day’s vir­tu­al me­dia con­fer­ence.

He warned cit­i­zens to com­ply “so that more re­stric­tive mea­sures don’t have to be im­ple­ment­ed.”

“We know peo­ple are tired. We know peo­ple are frus­trat­ed. But you know what? The virus is not tired. The virus is not frus­trat­ed. The virus is alive and kick­ing all over the world,” Deyals­ingh said.

He said once cit­i­zens ad­here to and obey these mea­sures, COVID-19 cas­es can be re­duced dras­ti­cal­ly with­in a month.

“Let us set that tar­get for our­selves. Let us set a col­lec­tive tar­get as team Trinidad and To­ba­go that by the mid­dle to the end of May, if we ad­here to these mea­sures we can see these fig­ures low­ered sig­nif­i­cant­ly,” he said.

To en­sure ad­her­ence to the reg­u­la­tions, new­ly-ap­point­ed Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Fitzger­ald Hinds said he would ask the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice to have a spe­cif­ic team of of­fi­cers ded­i­cat­ed to its en­force­ment.

“Spe­cial teams of of­fi­cers, we ex­pect, would be put to­geth­er - di­vi­sion by di­vi­sion...all of the nine po­lice di­vi­sions across Trinidad and To­ba­go- and I will ask them to re­port to this team on a dai­ly ba­sis their ac­tiv­i­ty in terms of their en­force­ment of those reg­u­la­tions, where peo­ple would be made to feel it in their pock­ets if they prac­tice the un­think­ing be­hav­iour of dis­re­gard­ing the se­cu­ri­ty and the safe­ty of all of us,” Hinds said.

The mea­sures are re­it­er­a­tions of those in­sti­tut­ed last year dur­ing the peak of the out­break.