April 15, 2020

Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar once again says the Health Ministry is not being truthful

By Newsroom

The Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar is once again accusing the Ministry of Health of not being up front with the people of T&T. In a statement she said that there are glaring inconsistencies in the official testing statistics. Persad-Bisessar called on the nation to put pressure of the Health Ministry and demand accountability.

The following is the full statement from the Opposition Leader:

“It is with great concern that, for the second time in as many days, I find myself once again calling on the Health Minister to come clean to the population about the true state of the Ministry’s testing capacity for the dangerous Covid-19 disease.

This as ongoing attempts by Minister Terrence Deyalsingh to cover up the true state of the Coronavirus spread in Trinidad and Tobago has now turned into a blatant and dangerous political ‘freak show’.

Notably, I am not the only person to call for this much needed clarity on behalf of the population. Having seen the obvious, glaring inconsistencies in the Health Ministry’s official testing statistics, many health experts and concerned independent social activists have now launched a collective call for transparency and accountability.

This amid deep fears and ongoing anxiety in the population over the realization that the Government NEVER had any comprehensive plan to effectively combat this dangerous and destabilizing Coronavirus pandemic.

WIDESPREAD UNDER-TESTING CONTINUES

As of today, the following reality still stands:

The State’s Covid-19 testing apparatus, equipment and capacity continue to be woefully lacking, and now, dangerously inadequate.

the number of Covid positive cases is barely, if at all, increasing because the number of tests is barely increasing

the Health Ministry has consistently failed to enable private medical labs to do the much needed Covid-19 testing

CARPHA, the only authorized Covid-19 testing lab, serves the entire Caribbean. This means its testing capacity for T&T remains severely limited.

CARPHA is now facing a problem of limited sampling kits. There are now serious questions in the public domain as to whether Covid-19 results are being compromised.

Notably, the Health Minister and CMO are yet to adequately explain to the population the following unanswered questions:

  1. How many actual unique individuals were tested by CARPHA and how many are

retests, as opposed to the amount of samples? The CMO was pressed by a journalist to confirm today that numerous persons underwent Covid-19 retests on several occasions.

He all but admitted, therefore, that the Health Ministry’s published official figures are misleading.

  1. How many deaths with flu like symptoms that were never tested for Covid-19 have been recorded as suspected cases? Ongoing anecdotal evidence suggests that there are many patients at hospitals with Covid like symptoms, who are not being tested, with some deaths also occurring.
  2. From January 2020 to present, how many deaths were recorded of persons who exhibited flu like symptoms but were refused Covid-19 tests?
  3. How many of these deaths were instead listed as lower respiratory tract infections, acute

asthmatic attacks, pneumonia, or heart failure?

  1. How did the Health Ministry know that Covid-19 was not in T&T before March, 2020, when there was no testing taking place? To keep making such a claim is baseless, unscientific and misleading.

It is truly unacceptable that the Health Minister continues to deliberately refuse to answer these pertinent questions of national public interest. Instead, he continues to resort to dangerous and unwarranted political attacks on the Opposition and members of the public who seek, as our

Constitutional right, transparency and accountability from the Government. It begs the question as to whether Deyalsingh is really trying to buy time to do more testing, to once more bamboozle the population into thinking he has not fallen down on this job. This is in keeping with his Government’s initial refusal to allow the Opposition to debate the Coronavirus pandemic for more than four times in the Parliament from since January.

The Government has also consistently and arrogantly refused the Opposition’s ongoing offers of assistance and input from experienced medical team, to the detriment of the country.

I urge all citizens to ignore Deyalsingh’s dangerous political games and continue to strongly pressure the Government to come clean on this matter of crucial national importance, since our very lives now depend on it.”

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