Dr Hinds: Be responsible about Easter travel

With the end of the school term and the Easter weekend coming, the Health Ministry is reminding parents that in-person camp activities are currently not permitted. It is also urging people who plan to travel to Tobago to practise caution and personal responsibility.

Speaking at the Health Ministry’s covid19 media conference on Wednesday, County Medical Officer of Health for St Andrew/St David Dr Allana Best reminded parents that camp activities are not currently permitted.

“We have to continue to safeguard our children, and certainly families can do things as a unit, and where possible these can be outdoor opportunities or in areas that are well-ventilated.

"For religious leaders, we know it’s the Easter time. It is also a good idea for you to have a list of people attending each service so that in the event that a positive case were to arise, we can more promptly do a comprehensive contact-tracing exercise.”

Epidemiologist Dr Avery Hinds encouraged people who may be travelling to Tobago to be responsible.

“As we enter the end of the school term and the Easter holiday, we do note there is the existing plan for a lot of movement between Trinidad and Tobago.

"We want to encourage the individuals who are travelling to exercise a great deal of personal responsibility in their planning and movement. If we are aware that we have plans to travel but someone has become ill, someone has been exposed, someone is a contact of a positive case, these are the opportunities we have to reduce risk to others by changing our plans. We do not want to have information that we’ve been exposed or that we are actually ill and we take that illness with us when we travel.”

He said that level of personal responsibility, added to the enhanced preparedness of the health system to track, test and trace, would hopefully contribute the reduction of widespread transmission.

The health system and the population would have to work together, he said, to ensure the gains made so far are not undone by what happens over the next couple of weeks.

Hinds said even though the recent health conferences have concentrated on clusters around Trinidad, TT is still listed as being in low-level community spread.

Geographic information systems manager Dr Roshan Seeramsingh said the Health Ministry has launched a dashboard which will show weekly changes in spread of covid19 in each county. It will also chart the number of new cases per day, the gender breakdown of these cases, and the proportion of total cases to total unique tests.

The dashboard can be found under the covid19 tab of the Ministry of Health’s website.