Principal Medical Officer: Parallel health system far from full

As repatriation of citizens and the lifting of some public health regulations continues, Principal Medical Officer Dr Maryam Abdool-Richards said local healthcare facilities are capable of accommodating infected people if the number of covid19 cases increases.

Abdool-Richards was responding to questions from reporters during the Ministry of Health's covid19 update on Monday. She said the repatriation process has been carefully planned to allow for maximum intake while ensuring facilities were not overwhelmed with cases.

She said as of Monday, there were 600 spaces available for quarantine, with 1,551 beds spread across 19 facilities.

"Within the parallel healthcare system, we have stratified the risk level of people across hospitals, quarantine centres for returning nationals and step-down facilities for covid patients who have comorbidities or who may have a socioeconomic challenge in terms of the covid19 mitigation measures

"Our cut-off point, in terms of the 70 per cent, has not been reached. In fact our Intensive Care Unit (ICU) bed capacity – even when the cases of community transmission were high, we got an occupancy of about 20 per cent. Our High Dependency Unit (HDU) capacity has not gone beyond 40 per cent.

"We are repatriating about 300 people every ten days, which allows for the turnaround of these facilities if there is need for preventative maintenance."

Epidemiologist Dr Avery Hinds said TT's pandemic status is monitored daily. Given the dynamic nature of the pandemic, he said a specific number of cases could not be used as a marker as to whether or not the situation has improved or worsened.

"If we see the speed at which new infections show up endangers our ability to manage these cases, we will move to manage.

"It's not advisable to try and stick a particular number as to when we will make the change."

But if the need arose, he said, a change in status would be brought to the attention of the public.