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Tuesday, July 8, 2025

All citizens must be COVID protocol enforcers

by

1555 days ago
20210405

Trinidad and To­ba­go en­ters the fi­nal stretch of the hol­i­day pe­ri­od to­day with the East­er Mon­day hol­i­day. How­ev­er, with forced mut­ed cel­e­bra­tions due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and a pal­pa­ble pan­dem­ic fa­tigue ever-present, the biggest chal­lenge re­mains fight­ing off the lat­est spike in cas­es.

In that re­gard, as the coun­try en­ters this fi­nal week of the East­er va­ca­tion, this news­pa­per urges the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice to con­tin­ue the work it start­ed on the week­end to en­sure cit­i­zens re­main com­pli­ant with the health pro­to­cols of sani­tis­ing, wear­ing masks and so­cial dis­tanc­ing in pub­lic spaces.

It goes with­out say­ing that the biggest re­spon­si­bil­i­ty in fight­ing the virus lies with the cit­i­zens them­selves. It is on­ly they who have the pow­er to be the ul­ti­mate en­forcers of the sim­ple pro­to­cols we have as first lay­ers to keep­ing COVID away.

As two re­cent in­ci­dents at the St Fran­cis RC Church in Bel­mont and Ch­agua­nas Mar­ket have shown, on­ly the cit­i­zens will know when they are feel­ing un­well and use this as a sig­nal to stay at home pend­ing a de­ter­mi­na­tion of what that ill-feel­ing means. In both cas­es, in­volv­ing three peo­ple who lat­er test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus, they ex­posed hun­dreds to po­ten­tial dan­ger.

As Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram has said many times dur­ing this pan­dem­ic, flu-like symp­toms dur­ing a pan­dem­ic are to be tak­en very se­ri­ous­ly. Judg­ing from these lat­est in­ci­dents, some cit­i­zens are still tak­ing their health con­di­tions too light­ly and ven­tur­ing out in­to the pub­lic do­main, there­by plac­ing the health and well-be­ing of oth­ers at risk.

Ul­ti­mate­ly then, it may come down to the TTPS be­com­ing the watch­ful en­forcers.

Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith has tak­en in front, head­ing to To­ba­go over the week­end to com­mand his col­leagues in en­sur­ing the bars, beach­es and oth­er spots where peo­ple con­gre­gate in their num­bers were mon­i­tored.

The task is tough for the po­lice as well since it is re­port­ed that some 10,000 Trinida­di­ans jour­neyed to To­ba­go for the East­er va­ca­tion. On Sat­ur­day alone, some 47 tick­ets were is­sued to cit­i­zens for not wear­ing face masks. In the cur­rent sce­nario, how­ev­er, this is 47 too many.

Again, no amount of en­force­ment by the po­lice will pre­vent the un­seen sce­nar­ios where cit­i­zens ex­pose them­selves and oth­ers to the dis­ease. The re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, there­fore, lies with each and every one of us from now un­til the Min­istry of Health can ac­quire the close to 700,000 vac­cines it will need to in­oc­u­late cit­i­zens to achieve herd im­mu­ni­ty in the first in­stance. Even then, based on what we have seen in oth­er coun­tries that are close to or have al­ready achieved the num­bers need­ed for such sta­tus, we are still a long way from de­ter­min­ing whether vac­cines do pro­vide the an­ti­bod­ies need­ed to se­ri­ous­ly fight off the COVID scourge.

As such, the vig­i­lance must re­side with the in­di­vid­ual and we urge all cit­i­zens to fight against the lax be­hav­iour which is threat­en­ing an­oth­er wave of COVID.


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