Cit­i­zens were giv­en the dis­tress­ing news yes­ter­day that one of two ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed na­tion­als who re­turned to Trinidad and To­ba­go since the bor­ders were re­opened and test­ed pos­i­tive for the Delta vari­ant of COVID-19 ex­hib­it­ed symp­toms al­most a week lat­er.

The in­for­ma­tion is dis­con­cert­ing giv­en that un­der cur­rent bor­der en­try pro­to­cols, trav­ellers are re­quired to pro­vide a PCR test 72 hours be­fore trav­el here and on ar­rival, un­vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers are placed in manda­to­ry state quar­an­tine while ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers can go to their in­tend­ed lo­cal des­ti­na­tions. Min­istry of­fi­cials have in­di­cat­ed that the ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed trav­ellers are asked to self-iso­late for two weeks be­fore go­ing in­to pub­lic cir­cu­la­tion but this, nat­u­ral­ly, means they are left to their own de­vices on meet­ing this re­quire­ment.

In giv­ing de­tails of the two cas­es yes­ter­day, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said one of them was an en­er­gy work­er whose com­pa­ny had its own quar­an­tine mea­sures in place. As such, the per­son was al­ready iso­lat­ed, fa­cil­i­tat­ing an easy Health Min­istry con­tact trac­ing process for sev­en to eight peo­ple ex­posed.

How­ev­er, the oth­er case must cer­tain­ly ring alarm bells for Dr Paras­ram and his team. That in­di­vid­ual be­gan ex­hibit­ing symp­toms five days af­ter ar­rival and vis­it­ed a health cen­tre for a COVID test. A sub­se­quent genome se­quenc­ing test by the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies con­firmed the Delta vari­ant.

Ef­fec­tive­ly, there are two sce­nar­ios pos­si­ble here. First­ly, this pa­tient could have con­tract­ed the strain in the pe­ri­od af­ter tak­ing a PCR test abroad and re­turn­ing to T&T. Sec­ond­ly, how­ev­er, they could have ar­rived COVID-free and con­tract­ed the virus with­in their home en­vi­ron­ment, where three to four peo­ple were their close con­tacts.

The cur­rent sci­ence shows that the Delta vari­ant is not on­ly more trans­mis­si­ble but al­so has a short­er in­cu­ba­tion pe­ri­od. Need­less to say, just this one in­di­vid­ual who slipped through the crack ei­ther could be a com­mu­ni­ty su­per­spread­er, based on how ac­tive they may have been out­doors or end­ed up in a com­mu­ni­ty where the Delta al­ready ex­ists.

De­spite this pos­si­bil­i­ty, the CMO stood by the cur­rent bor­der en­try pro­to­cols, not­ing that the two cas­es were out of some 14,222 peo­ple who had re­turned since bor­ders re­opened on Ju­ly 17. In Dr Paras­ram's view, the 99.986 of the pas­sen­gers who have re­mained COVID-free since re­turn­ing is enough to re­tain the cur­rent bor­der en­try pro­ce­dure.

Some­how, though, we feel this is one time when one case is enough to war­rant some tweak­ing of the cur­rent sys­tem. T&T is cur­rent­ly trend­ing in the right di­rec­tion re­gard­ing dai­ly cas­es but as the ex­perts have in­di­cat­ed, those need­ing ICU and HDU treat­ment, or dy­ing, re­main at dis­con­cert­ing lev­els.

Giv­en what we have seen of the Delta's be­hav­iour in oth­er coun­tries and with the new­er MU vari­ant now as close at St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, we feel it is bet­ter to err on the side of cau­tion than to be com­fort­ed by what ap­pears to be bor­der en­try suc­cess up to now. Who knows, the horse may have al­ready bolt­ed from the sta­ble with this one case. We hope, there­fore, that Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh will call an ur­gent meet­ing with his med­ical ex­perts to re­vis­it the pol­i­cy, as it may mean the dif­fer­ence be­tween life and death.