In what may well have been one of the more poignant presentations that he has had to make to his countrymen and women during his tenure in office, Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, on Saturday, in attendance at his Ministry of Health’s weekly news conference, spelt out what is perhaps best described as the ‘bottom line’ as to just where the country is, physically and emotionally, insofar as the Covid-19 pandemic is concerned.
The gist of what Dr. Rowley appeared to be saying was that the twin-island Republic, having drifted for some time in the choppy waters of indifference towards the head of steam which the Covid-19 pandemic had been steadily gathering, had now collided with the stark reality of the storm and that the impact had now transformed what, in large measure, had been a circumstance of indifference, into one of profound national uneasiness, to say the least.
Trinidad and Tobago, or at least much of the country, Dr. Rowley said on Saturday, with a bluntness that, to some, might even have appear-ed unstatesmanlike, is in the process of negotiating a scrambled and terrified descent from what had been a perch of benign indifference to the threat posed by the pandemic. Their destination, it appears at this juncture, may well be a premonition of worse to come. Trinidadians, these days, it seems, are in the process of swallowing a great deal of their earlier pouting and pushback, a panic-driven response, Dr. Rowley suggests, to the harsh reality that reposes in the ever mounting numbers of the stricken and the dead.
Nor was there anything in what he had to say on Saturday that suggested, even remotely, that the authorities in Port of Spain are possessed of anything resembling that ‘magic bullet’ solution which many his countrymen and women now appear to be frantically hoping for. The most that can be hoped for, he appeared to be saying, is that the truth in the numbers had now sunk in to a point where the stark reality might, perhaps, now lead to a condition of significantly enhanced national soberness and a corresponding hunkering down behind the strictures of the country’s latest emergency measures, a tate of Emergency (SOE) and its attendant eight-hour (9 pm – 5 am) curfew that took effect as of Saturday coupled with an energetic official urging that Trinidad-ians continue to get vaccinated.
At what is perhaps best described as the peak of a pronouncement that appeared concerned, less with a sparing of feelings and much more with effective delivery of the message, Dr. Rowley is quoted as saying: “I am sorry that it has come to coffins and faces of dead people for us to realize that we are in and have always been in a very difficult place. Before we were only dealing with numbers, but I think the population is at the stage now where the numbers are being seen to be of people even known to you.”
Twenty one dead in a single day! If this pronouncement, particularly, does not make Trinidad and Tobago (and the rest of the region, for that matter) sit up and listen, then, there is little else that one can think of, that will.
The Trinidad and Tobago circumstance, inevitably brings us home, and to the question as to whether we ourselves might not be on the edge of that zone where the afflicted and the dead will become the looking glass through which we catch an unpalatable glimpse of our own situation. Where else does Dr. Rowley’s grim refrain lead us in Guyana but, hopefully, to a sober contemplation of our own protracted delinquency and to what, we can now only hope, will be, as much a national assessment as an official one, of our extant circumstances and a commensurate response which, government, unquestionably, will have to lead?
Here in Guyana, it is the impact which the pandemic has had mostly on the night time entertainment sector that had caused patrons as much as proprietors to slip into a kind of open insurrection against the protocols, a condition which, for far too long, had benefitted from the embarrassingly underwhelming response of the authorities and the open defiance that came from those in the business sector and elsewhere who ought to know better.
Truth be told, by and large, not insignificant sections of our own population, including some whom one would have been expected to lead by example, continue to cock a snook at all of the signs that the Covid-19 pandemic means business. Who knows whether, given what little we still know about the extent of the seriousness of the pandemic here, we in Guyana are not, even now, drifting inexorably towards that ‘midnight hour’ that now appears to in the region of the doorstep of our sister CARICOM country.
