Cudjoe on sports' resumption: Ball in CMO's hands

MINISTER of Sport and Community Development Shamfa Cudjoe continues to encourage athletes and sport stakeholders to get vaccinated, but unlike other sectors, no specific targets or dates are in place to resume sports.

Meetings have been held recently with both athletes and sports national governing bodies to push the nationwide vaccination drive.

Sports in TT have been on the bench because of the covid19 pandemic, with just a few being played in recent months, with golf and tennis being two of them.

Contact sports and team sports are not allowed, but people are allowed to exercise in public. Gyms remain closed.

Cudjoe, asked whether a specific percentage of athletes must get the jab to resume sports, said,

“I don’t have any information like that from the Ministry of Health. All we know, the more we vaccinate as a population, we get closer to herd immunity, so we are doing our part to encourage the stakeholders under the Ministry of Sport and Community Development to vaccinate.”

Other sectors have given more details of late on gradually returning to a level of normality. On Saturday, at a covid19 media conference, the Prime Minister said all vaccinated students in forms four, five and six will have the option of returning to face-to-face classes on October 1.

Cudjoe said the sport ministry continues to encourage athletes to get vaccinated.

“As a ministry, we are working on doing vaccination drives (discussions) for the sporting disciplines under our watch…so they would be ready to get back out and do their business when that time comes and when the CMO (Dr Roshan Parasram) gives us the okay.”

SporTT chairman Douglas Camacho, speaking about the ongoing efforts to get the sporting community vaccinated, said, “We did have a meeting with NGBs and the athletes week before coming out of the (Olympic) games and now that the four-year cycle is over and mapping out the future. We keep reiterating about getting vaccinated and be part of the solution.”

Cudjoe, in a media conference after the Olympics on August 13, also urged athletes to get vaccinated so sports can return to some sort of normality.

Asked if TT was taking lessons from other countries in the region where sport has resumed, Cudjoe said, “The faster we vaccinate, the faster we could return to some level of normalcy.”

At that time, Cudjoe said athletes were still not rushing to get their vaccines.

“Even within the sporting sector vaccination hesitancy, I think, is quite high. You still have some athletes who are hesitant even in going out to Tokyo (Olympics). All the members of our team (were) not vaccinated.”

Days after that media conference, the majority of local football clubs Newsday spoke with said they would be willing to get vaccinated to resume football.

The Jamaica Premier League (football) resumed at the end of June after a 14-month absence. When the league resumed Jamaica averaged approximately 50 new cases per day, much fewer than what the country has been experiencing recently. On Monday, Jamaica recorded 739 cases and the day before, 929.

When the Jamaica Premier League resumed, TT’s covid19 numbers were much higher, as this country averaged over 200 new cases per day.