A to­tal of 111 mi­nors have been count­ed among na­tion­als who have re­turned home since this coun­try’s bor­ders re­opened on Ju­ly 17, but on­ly one of them has so far test­ed pos­i­tive for the COVID-19 virus.

Con­firm­ing this dur­ing the Min­istry of Health’s up­date on Sat­ur­day, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram re­fused to dis­close the child’s age or the coun­try from which he/she had re­turned from as he cit­ed pa­tient con­fi­den­tial­i­ty.

He did, how­ev­er, as­sure the mi­nor was, “be­ing well iso­lat­ed.”

Ques­tioned if any par­tic­u­lar vi­ral strain had been de­tect­ed, he said a sam­ple had been sent to UWI for genome test­ing.

T&T’s cur­rent pol­i­cy re­lat­ing to the repa­tri­a­tion of un­vac­ci­nat­ed mi­nors and peo­ple un­der the age of 18 is that they can go home with a vac­ci­nat­ed par­ent or guardian.

Peo­ple re­turn­ing must have a neg­a­tive PCR test 72 hours be­fore they ar­rive, while a sec­ond PCR test is done three to five days af­ter their en­try.

Paras­ram said the mi­nor would have test­ed pos­i­tive dur­ing the three to five-day swab­bing pro­ce­dure which fol­lowed the fam­i­ly’s ar­rival.

Re­spond­ing to pub­lic con­cerns re­gard­ing the vac­cine and its ef­fects, he sought to as­sure, “We had no one who had a sec­ond dose and was ad­mit­ted to a High De­pen­den­cy Unit.” This was fol­lowed by a fur­ther as­sur­ance that, “There is no ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed in­di­vid­ual in Trinidad or To­ba­go as well, who has been ad­mit­ted to the In­ten­sive Care Unit at this time.”

Re­gard­ing deaths that con­tin­ue to be record­ed, Paras­ram said there was no one at this time who has met the cri­te­ria “of be­ing ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed and has passed away from COVID-19 in T&T.”

A to­tal of 388,805 peo­ple have so far re­ceived one dose of a COVID-19 vac­cine, while 194,710 have re­ceived their two dos­es.

With over one mil­lion peo­ple cur­rent­ly un­vac­ci­nat­ed at this time, the CMO said just un­der 400,000 are be­low the age of 18.

Epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds said a slight in­crease in the dai­ly num­bers had been not­ed.

Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards said dai­ly rolling av­er­age in­creas­es would rep­re­sent an in­creased de­mand for hos­pi­tal beds across dif­fer­ent lev­els of care.

With a slight de­crease record­ed in dis­charges through­out the par­al­lel health­care sys­tem, she ex­plained it meant net ad­mis­sions had in­creased over­all.

To­tal oc­cu­pan­cy in the par­al­lel health sys­tem cur­rent­ly stands at 39 per cent.

BOX

254 new COVID cas­es, 7 deaths

COVID-19 in­fec­tions con­tin­ue to in­crease as hun­dreds of cas­es are record­ed each day.

In the dai­ly sta­tis­ti­cal up­date last evening, the Min­istry of Health con­firmed 254 new pos­i­tive cas­es had been record­ed be­tween the 24 hours from 4 pm on Ju­ly 30 to 4 pm on Ju­ly 31 – bring­ing the to­tal num­ber of ac­tive pos­i­tive cas­es to 5,951.

Mean­while, the death rate in­creased by sev­en as it moved to 1,077 dur­ing the same 24-hour pe­ri­od.

There are 311 pa­tients in the hos­pi­tal; 88 peo­ple are in step-down fa­cil­i­ties; 174 are in state quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties; while 5, 298 peo­ple have been con­fined to home self-iso­la­tion.