The health pro­to­cols for the up­com­ing gen­er­al elec­tion will be sim­i­lar to the pre-COVID-19 guide­lines ac­cord­ing to the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer, Dr Roshan Paras­ram.

On Fri­day, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley an­nounced that the gen­er­al elec­tion would be held on Au­gust 10.

"I think that the elec­toral process in the past would have lent it­self to some of the pub­lic health mea­sures we al­ready have in place. We have been work­ing with the Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion (EBC) to en­sure that they are aware of the guide­lines that should be put in place," Paras­ram said at the Min­istry of Health’s vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Sat­ur­day.

On Fri­day, Paras­ram shared a fi­nal draft of a guide­line which he said they want to pub­lish for the elec­tion process so that it could be used in the polling sta­tion on elec­tion day. He said the key prac­tices on elec­tion day should be so­cial dis­tanc­ing, mask-wear­ing, sani­ti­sa­tion.

Al­so, next Tues­day there will be a mock polling sta­tion set up by the EBC where the Min­istry of Health will be a part­ner to en­sure that the guide­lines are rolled out in the right way. They will then pub­lish the guide­lines for the pop­u­la­tion.

For those who are quar­an­tined, the bal­lots will be tak­en to them and af­ter it would be sani­tised be­fore be­ing re­turned to the EBC.

Speak­ing on the top­ic of elec­tion cam­paign­ing, Paras­ram said as of now the reg­u­la­tions state that crowds should be no big­ger than 25 peo­ple.

"In the com­ing months, I don’t think the de­ci­sion will be based on hav­ing a po­lit­i­cal ral­ly, the de­ci­sion will be made based on the sta­tus of the health of the pop­u­la­tion in terms of the epi­demi­ol­o­gy of the dis­ease if we go to 50. That de­ci­sion will come in the com­ing weeks. We have seen the im­pact of peo­ple con­gre­gat­ing in oth­er parts of the world with the es­ca­la­tion of the epi­dem­ic oc­cur­ring days lat­er. We are very cau­tious."

Paras­ram gave the lat­est up­date on COVID-19 pan­dem­ic which shows that the num­ber of tests done in the pub­lic sec­tor is 5,401, the to­tal num­ber of com­mu­ni­ty tests done so far has been 1,931. The to­tal num­ber of pos­i­tive cas­es are still 130 and the num­ber of deaths re­mains at eight. 498 peo­ple are in quar­an­tine at the mo­ment in the coun­try.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh who al­so spoke at the vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence said the next phase of re­open­ing of the coun­try would be the schools in Sep­tem­ber. He said if the Gov­ern­ment gives in to pres­sures from those who are ask­ing for the bor­ders to be re­opened, among oth­er re­quests, this will lead to com­mu­ni­ty spread and it could have neg­a­tive con­se­quences for the re­open­ing of schools.

He re­ferred to a World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) re­leased on Fri­day which stat­ed that coun­tries glob­al­ly are not ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a sec­ond or third wave but they are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a sec­ond or third peak in the first wave. Right now there are just over 11 mil­lion cas­es world­wide and the WHO is pre­dict­ing a sec­ond wave.