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Thursday, July 10, 2025

Sangre Grande maxi driver positive for COVID-19

by

Anna-Lisa Paul
1917 days ago
20200410
Police officers keep guard outside the Aged for the Home Facility on Bridge Road, Brooklyn Settlement, Sangre Grande, last weekend. Residents from the community are opposed to the Ministry of Health’s plan to use the facility as a step-down centre for recovering COVID-19 patients.

Police officers keep guard outside the Aged for the Home Facility on Bridge Road, Brooklyn Settlement, Sangre Grande, last weekend. Residents from the community are opposed to the Ministry of Health’s plan to use the facility as a step-down centre for recovering COVID-19 patients.

RALPH BANWARIE

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.


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