Trinidad and To­ba­go has record­ed its sec­ond death and 66th COVID-19 case.

The Min­istry of Health made the an­nounce­ment in its first dai­ly up­date on Fri­day.

"The Min­istry of Health in­forms the pop­u­la­tion that to­day, Fri­day 27th March, de­spite the best ef­forts of the health care pro­fes­sion­als, a sec­ond na­tion­al of T&T who test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19 has died," the re­lease said.

As per the min­istry's pol­i­cy, it on­ly re­vealed that the de­ceased T&T cit­i­zen was an el­der­ly man with pre-ex­ist­ing med­ical com­pli­ca­tions but Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands he died on Thurs­day.

The news comes al­most 48 hours af­ter the min­istry an­nounced this coun­try's first death due to the virus on Wednes­day night. That pa­tient was iden­ti­fied as Hansel Leon, 77.

The re­lease al­so stat­ed that the 66th over­all case is a To­ba­go health work­er.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that the work­er is at­tached to the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal and test­ed pos­i­tive ear­ly Fri­day.

In a re­lease, the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty that the work­er has been iso­lat­ed, staff meet­ings held and staff pro­vid­ed with psy­cho­log­i­cal sup­port. Con­tact trac­ing has al­so been ini­ti­at­ed. It al­so not­ed that the hos­pi­tal will be sani­tised and the sched­uled clean­ing and dis­in­fec­tion will con­tin­ue. This was the sec­ond case re­port­ed in To­ba­go. So far, 15 To­ba­go sam­ples have been sent to CARPHA for test­ing.

Thus far, the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency has test­ed 453 T&T sam­ples with 66 peo­ple test­ing pos­i­tive. Some 47 of these 66 pa­tients were from among a group of 68 na­tion­als who re­cent­ly re­turned home from an ill-fat­ed Caribbean cruise and were im­me­di­ate­ly quar­an­tined in Ba­lan­dra.

Of those who were ad­mit­ted with the virus, one per­son has re­cov­ered and has been dis­charged.