Ri­car­do Mil­ford, a pas­sen­ger on BW607, the flight in­to the coun­try when T&T’s bor­ders re­opened yes­ter­day, said he was hap­py to be back home.

Chi­na’s Am­bas­sador to Trinidad and To­ba­go, Fang Qiu, has con­firmed that the 800,000 Sinopharm vac­cines ex­pect­ed this week, are on sched­ule to ar­rive to­day.

The restau­rant in­dus­try in T&T is in cri­sis says Pres­tige Hold­ings Group CEO, Si­mon Hardy. Pres­tige Hold­ings, which op­er­ates the KFC brand, has no oth­er choice but to vac­ci­nate em­ploy­ees which will pave the way for the re­open­ing of restau­rants, Hardy said on Sat­ur­day.

Since Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley gave the green light to mo­tor ve­hi­cle sales com­pa­nies to op­er­ate from Mon­day, car deal­ers say they have been prepar­ing for some time now for the mo­ment and are ex­treme­ly hap­py to be able to serve their cus­tomers once again.

Eight hun­dred thou­sand Sinopharm jabs, enough to vac­ci­nate 400,000 peo­ple, is ex­pect­ed to ar­rive in the coun­try on Tues­day. Mean­while, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is ex­pect­ed to re­ceive his vac­ci­na­tion next week.

The man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor and car deal­er­ships got the green light to re­sume busi­ness from Mon­day as Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley an­nounced plans for the phased re­open­ing of the coun­try.

The T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce said it is pleased that the Gov­ern­ment has an­nounced re­duced re­stric­tions for a num­ber of sec­tors which is an im­por­tant step in the econ­o­my re­cov­er­ing.

The batch of drugs stolen from St James Med­ical Health Fa­cil­i­ty has been val­ued at $2.5 mil­lion and it in­cludes one that is used to treat crit­i­cal­ly ill COVID-19 pa­tients.

Al­though the au­thor­i­ties have not closed down El Pecos on the Grill Lim­it­ed and El Pecos on the Go Mar­ket, the Health Au­thor­i­ty has re­quest­ed that the own­ers ob­tain fur­ther re­quire­ments from them with­in 14 days be­fore the busi­ness is re­opened.

With T&T’s COVID-19 deaths hav­ing crossed clos­ing in on 900 (879 as of yes­ter­day) and In­ten­sive Care Unit (ICU) oc­cu­pan­cy rates hov­er­ing around 98 per cent, the easy avail­abil­i­ty of bur­ial plots and ready ac­cess to a cre­ma­to­ri­um has been vir­tu­al­ly elim­i­nat­ed.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) says that it has reached a mile­stone with the suc­cess­ful ad­min­is­tra­tion of 10,000 first-dose vac­cines to date for the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty as it makes way for the re­open­ing of the busi­ness sec­tor.

The bor­ders of T&T are set to re­open on Ju­ly 17. Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley was the bear­er of that good news on Sat­ur­day at the COVID-19 up­date at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann's. Row­ley said that the bor­ders would be open to both vac­ci­nat­ed and un­vac­ci­nat­ed cit­i­zens. The coun­try would al­so al­low en­try to vac­ci­nat­ed non-na­tion­als, but un­vac­ci­nat­ed non-na­tion­als are not go­ing to be al­lowed in the coun­try at this time.