Gail Alexan­der

The lat­est batch of na­tion­als who’ll be al­lowed to re­turn to Trinidad and To­ba­go are groups in Guyana, Venezuela and Mar­gari­ta – but every­one will have to make their own way home as Gov­ern­ment won’t be send­ing repa­tri­a­tion flights.

And Gov­ern­ment’s now be­ing flood­ed al­most “hourly with re­quests from na­tion­als all over the world seek­ing ex­emp­tion from bor­der clo­sure reg­u­la­tions, try­ing to get home.”

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young con­firmed this at yes­ter­day’s dai­ly Min­istry of Health COVID-19 up­date brief­ing.

Air and sea bor­der clo­sures are among mea­sures Gov­ern­ment’s tak­en to pro­tect T&T against COVID-19 spread. Virus cas­es were im­port­ed in­to T&T in March and there have been 116 cas­es and eight deaths - but no new cas­es re­cent­ly.

Young yes­ter­day said there’s been suc­cess with mea­sures to curb spread. He said Gov­ern­ment has been al­low­ing some na­tion­als in­to T&T with Health Min­istry ex­perts’ ad­vice, do­ing it in a way that the min­istry can man­age any pos­si­bil­i­ty of COVID re­in­fec­tion.

The group of 33 na­tion­als who re­turned from Bar­ba­dos re­cent­ly test­ed neg­a­tive and were re­leased from quar­an­tine on Tues­day. Al­so, 66 na­tion­als and one per­ma­nent res­i­dent re­turned from Suri­name on May 1.

But Young said yes­ter­day that there are 330,000 T&T pass­ports held by na­tion­als out­side the coun­try and many are be­gin­ning to ap­ply for bor­der-clo­sure ex­emp­tions to re­turn here.

“We’re get­ting re­quests al­most hourly – even up to (this morn­ing) – from na­tion­als in In­dia, UK, US, Sau­di Ara­bia. Every cor­ner. But Gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to pro­tect T&T care­ful­ly and we’re man­ag­ing re­turn of na­tion­als. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, we can­not en­cour­age repa­tri­a­tion of peo­ple scat­tered all over the world,” he said.

He said the next group be­ing al­lowed en­try are 23 work­ers based in Guyana.

“We’ve au­tho­rised their re­turn, they’re in the process of mak­ing trav­el arrange­ments and we’re await­ing ap­proval. It seems the ma­jor­i­ty were work­ing in the oil sec­tor,” he said.

Ap­proval was al­so giv­en for a young woman who was in the Ba­hamas to re­turn. She was hav­ing med­ical is­sues and was try­ing to arrange a med­ical air am­bu­lance to re­turn.

Young said he al­so au­tho­rised en­try for peo­ple in Mar­gari­ta and Venezuela.

“We’re prepar­ing for when they ar­rive, the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer and Health will de­cide how they’re han­dled af­ter be­ing med­ical­ly ex­am­ined and as­sessed,”

He said Gov­ern­ment wasn’t pay­ing for re­turns by any­one.

Some na­tion­als in Venezuela and Mar­gari­ta have claimed they’re out of funds and want to know if Gov­ern­ment would send a plane for them.

To this, Young said, “No –not at this stage. Gov­ern­ment’s not in a po­si­tion to send repa­tri­a­tion flights all over the world. Peo­ple are writ­ing us from all over. Those in Suri­name and Guyana are find­ing their way back – that’s where it’s at, at this stage. We’ve done our part. When we al­low peo­ple to re­turn in this man­aged way, it’s up to them to make their way here,” Young said.

Young said the hun­dreds of na­tion­als on cruise ships are al­so be­ing con­sid­ered.

“We’re very aware of them. We’d said shel­ter in place. We’re told by cruise ship com­pa­nies they’re be­ing looked af­ter. So it’s the best place to be. We’re man­ag­ing the (COVID) process with one mantra: pro­tect the T&T pop­u­la­tion in TT.”

On pos­si­ble manda­to­ry quar­an­ti­ning for trav­ellers when bor­ders even­tu­al­ly re­open, Young said, “We’re not at that bridge yet, how we deal with peo­ple re­turn­ing ahead, we’ll make the nec­es­sary an­nounce­ment.”

He said it was pre­ma­ture to dis­cuss quar­an­ti­ning’s ef­fect on tourism since Gov­ern­ment needs to see how things go glob­al­ly. But work is be­ing done with the en­er­gy sec­tor - a rev­enue life­line - so pro­duc­tion lev­els don’t de­cline. Young said the Prime Min­is­ter said a meet­ing would be held by Gov­ern­ment and de­ci­sions would be made on go­ing for­ward and “rolling back” some mea­sures, based on Health ad­vice.

“Bor­ders are a line of de­fence. T&T’s in fair­ly good con­trol of virus spread – the last thing we want is reim­por­ta­tion of cas­es to flood the sys­tem.”