Al­though ma­jor eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty is set to re­sume on Mon­day and will in­clude in­creased flights by Caribbean Air­lines as the air-bridge opens up, this coun­try's bor­ders will re­main closed for the time be­ing.

How­ev­er, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said ex­emp­tions con­tin­ue to be grant­ed for na­tion­als who re­main out­side of T&T, as well as those want­i­ng to leave T&T to re­turn to their home coun­tries.

Dur­ing Sat­ur­day's me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann's, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said dis­cus­sions were un­der­way with health of­fi­cials as it re­lat­ed to the "com­mer­cial repa­tri­a­tion" of cit­i­zens.

He said, "We have a steam of peo­ple on the out­side who want to come in."

Even though they ini­tial­ly start­ed with no en­try and then moved very slow­ly to al­low small num­bers back in, Row­ley said, "We want to move a lit­tle more ag­gres­sive­ly to bring cat­e­gories of peo­ple in."

Warn­ing that strin­gent con­trol still need­ed to be ex­er­cised, Row­ley ad­mit­ted, "The biggest threat to us now as a na­tion in re­spond­ing to the virus is get­ting in­fect­ed by an in­flow of peo­ple from the out­side, in­to this pop­u­la­tion."

Em­pathis­ing with those on the out­side who con­tin­ue to ap­peal for per­mis­sion to re­turn to T&T, the prime min­is­ter said, "We make the de­ci­sion at the bor­der based on how many peo­ple we think we can safe­ly bring in and suf­fi­cient­ly man­age the risk, that if there is in­fec­tion by per­sons com­ing or by com­mu­ni­ty spread here, that we do have the health in­fra­struc­ture to cope with the num­bers that could flare up."

He spoke about the Gov­ern­ment's de­ci­sion to bring in 275 stu­dents who are scat­tered across the re­gion and will com­plete ex­ams by the end of Ju­ly.

Row­ley said in or­der to en­sure the manda­to­ry two-week quar­an­tine pe­ri­od was ad­hered to, they had to keep their eyes on the avail­abil­i­ty of beds to house re­turn­ing na­tion­als.

"For those peo­ple who can fund them­selves to get in quick­ly, we will co­op­er­ate a bit more with them to get them in, but against the back­ground of how that has an im­pact on the rooms that are avail­able be­cause there are dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of rooms," Row­ley said.

Claim­ing that any up­surge in the vi­ral spread lo­cal­ly would im­pact the repa­tri­a­tion process, Row­ley said it would lead to a re­duc­tion in the num­bers re­turn­ing and for those com­ing from ar­eas where the virus is wide­spread. He said care­ful checks had to be done to safe­guard the lo­cal pop­u­la­tion from in­fec­tion.

He said the moves to bring in ex­ter­nal stu­dents and na­tion­als from cruise ships would place T&T in a po­si­tion where most of the avail­able ca­pac­i­ty would be used up, even though it is on­ly for quar­an­tine.

Young said even though dis­cus­sions had been held with cruise ship op­er­a­tors, they were still un­clear ex­act­ly how many T&T na­tion­als were strand­ed on such ves­sels.

Re­veal­ing one cruise ship op­er­a­tor re­cent­ly agreed for the boat to be used as a quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ty, Young said they were con­cerned af­ter eight peo­ple test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 on a cruise ship in St Vin­cent.

He said if that ship comes in, they would de­cant peo­ple to a land-use sys­tem in batch­es, which re­quired a lot of care­ful man­age­ment.

The par­al­lel health sys­tem has a to­tal bed ca­pac­i­ty of 922, which in­cludes 200 beds at Cou­va; 100 beds at Cau­ra; and be­tween 50 to 60 beds at the Au­gus­tus Long fa­cil­i­ty which are all hos­pi­tal-type set­tings. The are beds spread across sev­er­al step-down and quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties.

Young, Deyals­ingh and the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram are sched­uled to meet this com­ing week to dis­cuss how they could ex­tend ca­pac­i­ty out­side of the hos­pi­tal set­tings.

Up to 4 pm yes­ter­day, tests sub­mit­ted to the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency and the UWI Lab stood at 3,131 and 1,300 com­mu­ni­ty tests have so far been con­duct­ed.