An­na-Lisa Paul

One day af­ter res­i­dents of Brook­lyn Set­tle­ment, San­gre Grande cir­cu­lat­ed a pe­ti­tion call­ing on the au­thor­i­ties to meet with them be­fore re­lo­cat­ing re­cov­er­ing COVID-19 pa­tients to a step-down fa­cil­i­ty in the area, it was re­port­ed that San­gre Grande has record­ed its first case of the virus.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands a maxi-taxi dri­ver test­ed pos­i­tive and was on Thurs­day picked up by po­lice of­fi­cials as he plied his maxi for hire.

As news spread through­out the area, the al­ready trau­ma­tised res­i­dents of Brook­lyn Set­tle­ment said their fears had now been mag­ni­fied, as they spoke of the con­tact trac­ing pro­ce­dures that will now have to be done by the Min­istry of Health to de­ter­mine who the dri­ver may have in­ad­ver­tent­ly ex­posed.

Mean­while, copies of the pe­ti­tion, which was signed by 78 res­i­dents, were emailed and al­so hand-de­liv­ered to East­ern Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty CEO Ronald Tsoi-a-Fatt, the Of­fice of the Pres­i­dent and the Unit­ed Na­tions in Port-of-Spain on Thurs­day.

The first para­graph of the six-page doc­u­ment reads: “The mem­bers of Brook­lyn Com­mu­ni­ty are not in sup­port of the hous­ing of COVID pa­tients amongst our close-knit fam­i­ly for a num­ber of rea­sons stat­ed in our con­sti­tu­tion­al rights.”

The text con­tin­ued, “It is pub­lic knowl­edge that per­sons of all ages can be in­fect­ed by the coro­n­avirus and the old­er peo­ple and peo­ple with pre-ex­ist­ing med­ical con­di­tions ap­pear to be more vul­ner­a­ble.

“The pop­u­la­tion of our close-knit com­mu­ni­ty, our prized pos­ses­sion is our el­der­ly with there be­ing an 80 per cent ra­tio of same.”

Re­fer­ring to guide­lines as laid out by the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion urg­ing per­sons of all ages to take pre­cau­tions to pro­tect them­selves, the res­i­dents al­so cit­ed re­cent con­cerns in­ter­na­tion­al­ly that the virus may now have be­come air­borne.

As a re­sult, they in­sist­ed, “The pro­posed de­ci­sion to house re­cov­er­ing (not med­ical­ly cleared) COVID-19 pa­tients in the Brook­lyn com­mu­ni­ty is per­ceived by us the res­i­dents as en­dan­ger­ing our pub­lic safe­ty rights and aimed to de­prive our com­mu­ni­ty of our rights to live life and the en­joy­ment of prop­er­ty as we will all be forced to live in fear.”

Un­set­tled by claims late Thurs­day that pa­tients would be­gin ar­riv­ing in the area from Fri­day, some of the res­i­dents com­plained of feel­ing aban­doned by the Gov­ern­ment as they ex­pressed feel­ings of ne­glect.

One woman said, “It is al­most like our feel­ings on this doeAsn’t mat­ter to them. We feel like they have tak­en this de­ci­sion and be­cause they feel it is the right one, we just have to ac­cept their word and do what they say even though our rights are be­ing vi­o­lat­ed.”

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that plans had been un­der­way for sol­diers to oc­cu­py the Brook­lyn Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre, which is a short dis­tance from the step-down fa­cil­i­ty at Bridge Road, as they would have been re­quired to pro­vide se­cu­ri­ty for the re­cov­er­ing pa­tients.

How­ev­er, of­fi­cials from the Brook­lyn Set­tle­ment Vil­lage Coun­cil con­firmed last night said the keys had been re­turned to them on Thurs­day.

One mem­ber said when ques­tions had ini­tial­ly been raised re­gard­ing pay­ment of the util­i­ties dur­ing the sol­diers’ stay, no an­swer had been giv­en. How­ev­er, he con­firmed that when of­fi­cials were again asked to pro­vide an an­swer in writ­ing the keys were re­turned to the coun­cil.