Re­peat­ed­ly, and with in­creas­ing ur­gency over the past few weeks, Gov­ern­ment and health of­fi­cials had been warn­ing about the wors­en­ing COVID-19 sit­u­a­tion in this coun­try. Be­fore East­er, an uptick in cas­es in Coun­ty Ca­roni was the har­bin­ger of this in­creas­ing threat to the pub­lic health sys­tem.

Still, some cit­i­zens ig­nored the warn­ings and now the coun­try is pay­ing the price with the rein­tro­duc­tion of an al­most to­tal lock­down.

There was the vain hope that the graphs track­ing the rapid rise in cas­es and Min­istry of Health up­dates show­ing the dai­ly tal­ly of new in­fec­tions mov­ing from sin­gle to dou­ble and then triple dig­its, would have awak­ened cit­i­zens to the mag­ni­tude of the loom­ing cri­sis.

But the lev­els of de­nial were so wide­spread in the pop­u­la­tion that ap­peals to stop con­gre­gat­ing were most­ly ig­nored, even af­ter the im­po­si­tion of the first tranche of the lat­est pub­lic re­stric­tions last Thurs­day.

Even more grim warn­ings were giv­en at the news con­fer­ence host­ed yes­ter­day by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley.

Based on the facts pre­sent­ed by pub­lic health of­fi­cials, on the cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry, T&T is just about a week away from a full-blown pub­lic health cri­sis.

The hope now is that the grim sce­nar­ios pre­sent­ed by act­ing Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards and epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds about the threat to the par­al­lel health sys­tem will, at long last, be heed­ed by those whose be­hav­iours have been fa­cil­i­tat­ing the re­cent spread of the coro­n­avirus.

One chill­ing fact that should leave no doubt about the grave sit­u­a­tion fac­ing the coun­try is that the par­al­lel health sys­tem, com­pris­ing 542 beds in sev­en hos­pi­tals, is ten days or less away from col­laps­ing un­der the de­mand for ser­vices.

Ac­cord­ing to Dr Hinds, there could be up­wards of 10,000 ac­tive COVID-19 cas­es in the coun­try by May 22.

Even Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram, who has been com­mend­ed for his calm pro­fes­sion­al de­meanour through­out the pan­dem­ic, did not mince words in his lat­est as­sess­ment of the Brazil vari­ant, which is now well-em­bed­ded in the pop­u­la­tion, spread­ing faster and hit­ting hard­er, as well as the fact that younger peo­ple with­out co-mor­bidi­ties were now dy­ing from the virus.

These grim fore­casts from pub­lic health ex­perts should be tak­en very se­ri­ous­ly. The night­mar­ish sit­u­a­tions be­ing viewed from a dis­tance in In­dia could be­come re­al­i­ty here very soon, with hos­pi­tals out of space and COVID-19 corpses pil­ing up.

To stave off dis­as­ter, cit­i­zens have very few choic­es. Dr Row­ley’s ad­vice to cit­i­zens to “use what you have close by and di­min­ish your ex­po­sure to the virus” should be obeyed.

The in­con­ve­nience of hav­ing to do with­out non-es­sen­tial re­tail out­lets for the next three weeks and re­duced op­er­at­ing hours for those deemed es­sen­tial, are a much bet­ter op­tion than con­tin­u­ing down the cur­rent path for which, as Dr Row­ley stat­ed, “the wages of this is death for some peo­ple."

So, T&T is now back to square one with pan­dem­ic re­stric­tions once again ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed. Al­though the na­tion has been spared, at least for now, the added stress of a cur­few and state of emer­gency, the worst-case sce­nar­ios can­not be com­plete­ly ruled out.

And if that hap­pens, we can’t say that we were not warned.