The num­ber of COVID-19 cas­es record­ed dai­ly in T&T con­tin­ues to plateau.

This is ac­cord­ing to epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds, who said this trend was ob­served over the last two months.

Speak­ing dur­ing the Min­istry of Health's vir­tu­al me­dia brief­ing on Sat­ur­day, Hinds said they there was a slow­er de­cline in the num­ber of cas­es in Sep­tem­ber in­to Oc­to­ber.

He said, “Com­ing from the peak of late Au­gust, we had a faster de­cline from late Au­gust to ear­ly Sep­tem­ber, and then a slow­er de­cline across Sep­tem­ber in­to Oc­to­ber. Ba­si­cal­ly, it's sort of a flat­line if you look at the line run­ning through the graph. That means we're sort of plateau­ing with re­gard to the num­ber of new peo­ple test­ing pos­i­tive on a giv­en day."

In­di­cat­ing they need­ed to place greater fo­cus on risk mit­i­ga­tion now, Hinds said, “If we are see­ing a plateau mean­ing that we're not re­al­ly go­ing down...they are go­ing down very slow­ly if at all, it means that our be­hav­iours at present in the pop­u­la­tion are just about keep­ing the virus bub­bling slow­ly some­where along the line.

“What we need to fo­cus on as we en­ter this phase of try­ing to elim­i­nate virus trans­mis­sion is we re­al­ly need to fo­cus on risk mit­i­ga­tion or risk re­duc­tion in our in­di­vid­ual in­ter­ac­tions."

He said the largest num­ber of peo­ple test­ing pos­i­tive re­mained in the 25–49 age group, whilst the vi­ral spread con­tin­ued to re­main high­est in pop­u­la­tion cen­tres in north to south Trinidad and along the East/West Cor­ri­dor.

He urged peo­ple to con­tin­ue ad­her­ing to pub­lic health reg­u­la­tions to so­cial dis­tance, wash hands and sani­tise, and al­so re­main at home if ill.

To date, 5,241 in­di­vid­u­als have been in­fect­ed with COVID-19, of which 1,601 are ac­tive cas­es, with 3,545 re­cov­ered, and 98 still hos­pi­talised.