(Trinidad Express) As Trinidad and Tobago’s hospital space has increased over the past week, the Government will now amplify its efforts to repatriate stranded nationals.
This was announced by Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley yesterday who spoke to members of the media in a press conference in Port of Spain. According to Dr. Rowley, the use of home quarantining has created enough space in the parallel healthcare system to allow for those stranded to return. As a result, he said that exemptions will be granted liberally.
“We will grant exemptions in a much more liberal way. Persons will come home and when they arrive here, the CMO, they may have concerns, the CMO will manage that because he is managing the population at large. After eight months we really need to close this chapter in a more effective way,” he said.
He said that issues of transportation need to be sorted in order for this to be facilitated, as many of those stranded may need aid in obtaining a flight. However, he said that the issue will be worked on to allow citizens to return. He added that priority would be given to nationals who are based in Trinidad and Tobago and left the country for a temporary period.
“So those persons on the outside who have been very patient, we need to bring them home as quickly as we can but we do have transportation issues, even if we grant the exemptions there are still going to be issues of how they get here. In so far as cooperating in arranging the kinds of transport that they have been arranging there recently, to take the children out and bring them back from university and so on, we will work with the objective being to get as many people who are domicile in Trinidad and Tobago. Those are primary concerns right now. People who live here who went outside and couldn’t get back home,” he said. Whether or not these persons would be permitted to enter home quarantine on returning, he said, would be a decision left up to the Chief Medical Officer. However, he said, it would be dependent on the available space in the system. “I don’t see people coming home now that we’ve moved to home quarantine. Before if you came in you had to go into the quarantine that was available, the mandatory quarantine. Now that the mandatory quarantine is not available, we have to determine what happens to these people when they come home. If they come and we have more space and our testing capacity has improved, we will then be able to say,” he said.
Addressing a change on Barbados’ entrance policies, which now asks for negative test upon entry, he said that persons who were affected and now unable to make a recent flight scheduled for today should adjust their plans accordingly.
“The Minister just said that has nothing to do with this Government, It is a condition laid down by the Government of Barbados so the traveler and the Government we are all caught in the same position…Barbados has put arrangements in place and we just now have to rework the movements. If you were supposed to go and you can’t meet the conditions to land in Barbados then we just have to go for the next opportunity,” he said.
Also speaking at the conference, Minister of Health, Terrance Deyalsingh said that the country must abide by the decisions made by other states to protect their population.
“If you look at the England decision recently. Every country is taking decisions at very short notice. England took a decision that any person coming back into England had to quarantine for 4 days. That caught English citizens returning from Spain on a plane coming in. They left Spain not knowing that they had to quarantine. In the air, England took a decision. When they landed they had to go into quarantine. The point I am trying to make, all countries make these decisions to protect their populations and we have to live with it,” said Deyalsingh.
