Trinidad and Tobago Government to Support Workers Affected by COVID Measures

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – The Trinidad and Tobago government Monday outlined plans to provide financial support to persons affected by the clampdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) as health authorities said at least one million people here needed to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity from COVID-19.

Finance Minister, Colm ImbertFinance Minister Colm Imbert told a news conference that a salary relief grant for the month of May will be made available for people who have lost the jobs during this period because of the restrictions put in place to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Imbert said the TT$1,500 (One Tt dollar=US$0.16 cents) grant will also be made available to those who lost their jobs at the start of the month. He told reporters that TT$1,000 will be made available for those who have lost their jobs over the last few days, given the rollback of restrictions announced by Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley last week.

The Finance Minister said that the grants are expected to cover an estimated 20,000 workers and that the government had budgeted TT$30 million for that initiative.

In addition, the Finance Minister said that he will give consideration to establishing a grant to citizens overseas, who are not able to return home because of the locked borders.

However, he said he could not give any guarantee that this will come to fruition.

Imbert said that the government spent close to five billion dollars in relief grants on citizens for COVID-19 last year, but told reporters “we cannot do this again.”

Imbert said “double-checking” controls will be put in place to prevent double-dipping and to ensure that aid reaches those in need, which he acknowledged may lengthen the time taken for the disbursement of these grants.

Applications for these grants will be completely online and this system is expected to be operationalized as soon as Friday, and next Monday, by latest.

With respect to some 7,000 people who applied for grants last year but didn’t receive them because they didn’t have bank accounts, the Minister said these grants will be loaded onto debit cards.

As for those in the creative sector, he said he’ll take a recommendation to Cabinet to extend grants to those affected by the restrictions.

On Monday, the Ministry of Health reported that there were 99 new cases of the virus, pushing the total number of active cases to 3, 858. The authorities said 13, 454 people have tested positive for the virus since the first case was detected in March last year.

There have been four new deaths pushing the death toll to 215. The authorities said that there are 408 persons in state sanctioned quarantine and 3, 370 in isolation at home.

Meanwhile, Chief Medical Officer, (CMO) Dr Roshan Parasram called on persons to take the vaccine so as to ensure the country achieves herd immunity.

The CMO said vaccines are “among the most important public health interventions in history.” adding that if uptake is great, herd immunity can be achieved.

“We are looking at 70 per cent of the population in general just bearing in mind that most of the COVID-19 vaccines are available to persons over 18 meaning that we already have segment of the population who can’t be vaccinated, children, persons who are pregnant, breastfeeding, persons who have severe allergic reactions to components of the vaccines.

“All the rest of us need to come forward and have the vaccine to protect those in orange. When we do our calculations, we have approximately 1 million people who can take the vaccine and we are asking everyone to come forward and have your covid vaccine while it is available,” he said.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), herd immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune. This is achieved through vaccination or through previous infection. The latter, the WHO says is unethical and may lead to unnecessary infections, suffering and death.

It said vaccination lowers the opportunities for the virus to spread without making the population sick.

Dr. Parasram said that the government has been noting the progress and decreasing level of virus cases in the United Kingdom over the past few months

He said in countries where mass vaccinations continue, such as the UK, COVID-19 cases have decreased significantly. As such he called on citizens to participate in the vaccination drive.

“The UK has 60 million people as we have been looking at the UK in terms of their infections over the COVID-19 epidemic we see that their cases have gone significantly down since the introduction of their vaccines

“They had started the vaccinations in the 18 of December 2020 and what we are seeing now is their cases have gone considerably down there were able to vaccinate approximately 121, 000 persons per day. Even at their peak they were able to vaccinate 500,000 per day in the UK. What it led to was a considerable reduction in the number of cases.

“At this point 67.1 per cent of the adult population has one dose and 33.9 per cent has two doses. We are seeing right around our corner, St Kitts is doing very well,” Dr. Parasram told the weekly news conference by the Ministry of Health.

The ministry said it has been able to temporarily stave off the imminent collapse of the country’s main COVID-19 treatment network- the parallel healthcare system even as cases currently surge at record levels.

The ministry said 110 beds have been added to the step-down/transitional facility capacity and according to Principal Medical Officer of Institutions Dr Maryam Abdool-Richards the timing of the increased capacity will also help manage the limited staff in comparison to the number of cases.

.”At present, our major need or the demand is in the ward level beds,” Dr Abdool-Richards said.