This coun­try has nev­er be­fore faced as great a chal­lenge as we do to­day, to com­bat a face­less en­e­my that has al­ready sick­ened dozens of our cit­i­zens and claimed one life.

To be sure, COVID-19, which has now killed more than 24,000 peo­ple glob­al­ly and sick­ened more than 500,000, has brought gov­ern­ments and coun­tries to their knees and over­whelmed health sys­tems in some of the most ad­vanced coun­tries.

T&T has so far been able to cope with this chal­lenge us­ing the long-idle Cou­va Hos­pi­tal, Cau­ra Chest Hos­pi­tal and oth­er fa­cil­i­ties to care for those who have been strick­en by the virus.

These are ear­ly days but what has been clear is that this virus can on­ly be slowed if we prac­tice so­cial dis­tanc­ing, self-quar­an­tine and iso­la­tion if we be­lieve we may have been in con­tact with any­one who had it.

Glob­al­ly and in T&T, this has re­quired the use of emer­gency pow­ers by some gov­ern­ments to force their cit­i­zens to heed the ad­vice of pub­lic health of­fi­cials who be­lieve such ac­tions give us the best chance at suc­cess.

It is with this in mind that the Gov­ern­ment has so far re­ceived sig­nif­i­cant sup­port from the coun­try, in­clud­ing this news­pa­per, for its de­ci­sive ac­tions in seek­ing to lim­it the virus’ im­pact on T&T.

We are there­fore deeply trou­bled and dis­ap­point­ed by a state­ment from the Op­po­si­tion Leader in which she al­leges a cov­er-up by the Gov­ern­ment in the han­dling of the COVID-19 bat­tle.

Are we to be­lieve that this for­mer prime min­is­ter is seek­ing to be­smirch the hard work and rep­u­ta­tion of peo­ple like Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram and his col­leagues and sug­gest they would be par­ty to a cov­er-up in such a life and death is­sue?

As if it were not enough, the UNC leader us­es a death from the virus to launch a po­lit­i­cal at­tack on the Gov­ern­ment.

Is noth­ing out of bounds for Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar?

To be clear, we take no sides in this po­lit­i­cal fight but at a time when even the frac­tious US Con­gress can come to­geth­er in a bi­par­ti­san ef­fort to pass leg­is­la­tion to ame­lio­rate the im­pact of the virus on US na­tion­als, our Op­po­si­tion Leader and Prime Min­is­ter find them­selves in an un­seem­ly squab­ble.

Had the stakes not been so high, we would have left it as the cut and thrust of pol­i­tics in T&T. But if Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s sup­port­ers ac­cept her word and pan­ic, what will that do to the coun­try?

We hope it is not what she is hop­ing for. But if that is the de­sired out­come then you, Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar, will be right­ly ac­cused of putting per­son­al in­ter­est be­fore na­tion­al in­ter­est and would have di­min­ished your­self and your par­ty.