An All-Fools’ Day so­cial me­dia hoax about the coun­try en­ter­ing an­oth­er lock­down was yes­ter­day con­vinc­ing enough to have some cit­i­zens wor­ried about their East­er week­end plans go­ing down the drain.

But it was no laugh­ing mat­ter when Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram, at a Min­istry of Health COVID-19 up­date held out­side of the reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled thrice week­ly brief­in­gs, shared some dis­turb­ing new da­ta on an up­surge in cas­es across the coun­try.

It was not a hoax that in the last 24 hours three peo­ple died from COVID-19, tak­ing T&T’s death toll to 145 and that 46 new cas­es were con­firmed.

This wor­ry­ing trend, just days af­ter pub­lic health of­fi­cials warned about COVID-19 in­creas­es in the Coun­ties of Ca­roni and Vic­to­ria, rais­es the spec­tre of a new wave of the coro­n­avirus and an­oth­er lock­down—some­thing this coun­try can’t af­ford.

This long East­er week­end, large num­bers of cit­i­zens are head­ing to beach­es and oth­er recre­ation­al spots. That in­cludes the es­ti­mat­ed 10,000 do­mes­tic tourists in To­ba­go.

For all of these leisure seek­ers, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s warn­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly for those plan­ning to “en­joy the post-pan­dem­ic pre­ma­ture­ly or just to be gen­er­al­ly ir­re­spon­si­ble and even de­struc­tive,” takes on greater ur­gency.

Pan­dem­ic fa­tigue may be en­tic­ing some to ig­nore so­cial dis­tanc­ing mea­sures and de­fy the mask man­date at the risk of many lives and the al­ready frail health of the T&T econ­o­my.

There is no room for re­lax­ation of the pan­dem­ic reg­u­la­tions. The ar­rival of just over 33,000 dos­es of the COVID vac­cine in the coun­try is not an in­di­ca­tion that T&T is fi­nal­ly turn­ing the cor­ner on the pan­dem­ic. These dos­es will cov­er on­ly a small num­ber of cit­i­zens, so the vast ma­jor­i­ty will, for the fore­see­able fu­ture, still be sus­cep­ti­ble if its spread isn’t con­tained.

The sit­u­a­tion in Eu­rope, which is well ahead of us in the vac­cine roll­out, should be suf­fi­cient warn­ing about the risks.

Across that con­ti­nent, the num­ber of cas­es be­ing re­port­ed has forced many coun­tries to ei­ther re-in­tro­duce or ex­tend lock­down mea­sures.

Ger­many has ex­tend­ed its re­stric­tions un­til April 18 and Paris in France is en­ter­ing a new month-long lock­down, along with oth­er re­gions in the north and the south of the coun­try. France al­ready has a na­tion­wide cur­few from 7 pm to 6 am.

In Italy, shops, schools and restau­rants are closed in many ma­jor cities, in­clud­ing Rome and Mi­lan, and a na­tion­wide shut­down has been im­posed over the three-day East­er week­end, start­ing to­day.

An ear­ly warn­ing sign of where T&T could be head­ed is the fact that the lat­est up­surge in COVID-19 cas­es has led to the reim­po­si­tion of the ban on recre­ation­al team sports. If the num­bers keep head­ing in the wrong di­rec­tion, the worst-case sce­nario of an­oth­er lock­down looms large.

It could be much worse than the ex­pe­ri­ence of just a year ago, when all but es­sen­tial ser­vices were shut down. This time around, there will be no fi­nan­cial cush­ion for vul­ner­a­ble cit­i­zens and busi­ness­es and it will be much more dif­fi­cult to weath­er the pan­dem­ic storm.

There­fore, the East­er ac­tiv­i­ties over the next few days should not in­clude flirt­ing with an­oth­er lock­down.