Boat with bodies found in Atlantic
Local authorities have launched an investigation into the discovery of bodies in a boat floating about 120 km offshore Georgetown yesterday afternoon.
Minister of Home Affairs Robeson Benn told Stabroek News that based on a report received, the discovery was made by the crew of a vessel which was heading to Georgetown.
An inter-agency task force comprising of members of the Guyana Defence Force coast guard and the Maritime Administration Department was established to investigate the discovery.
Based on the images seen, Benn said that the bodies appear to be in an advanced state of decomposition.
The number of bodies in the boat was not immediately known. It is also unclear whether the vessel is registered here since it reportedly bore no name.
Benn explained that the boat is being towed to shore. It is expected to arrive at Port Georgetown between 1am and 2am today.
(Trinidad Guardian) Pregnant women would not be allowed to receive a COVID-19 vaccine- at least not right now.
Speaking during a Ministry of Health virtual press conference yesterday, Director of the Directorate of Women’s Health Dr Adesh Sirjusingh said there is currently a lack of data due to the exclusion of this category from the vaccine clinical trials. Pregnant women are among those who fall within the high-risk category for an adverse outcome from a COVID-19 infection.
“We simply do not have enough data to make a clear recommendation on this vulnerable population. Our country would therefore follow the advice from the World Health Organisation (WHO) when it comes to the emergency authorisation use in the population of Trinidad and Tobago and of course utilise our country’s own situation analysis which may differ from many others in the world,” he said.
The current situation analysis of COVID-19 infections in pregnant women locally appears to be quite optimistic as Dr Sirjusingh explained there is yet to be any fatalities in this group.
“Thirty-nine (pregnant) pregnant women in Trinidad have been infected by COVID-19 from our latest data and these were at different stages of pregnancy. Some of these women became very ill and required high-dependency unit care and intensive care unit care. However, all mothers and their delivered infants have been successfully managed to date. No newborn baby has been affected or has had to be hospitalised as a result,” he said.
There have been no pregnant women with COVID-19 in Tobago to date.
The country is expected to receive a first batch of close to 120,000 doses of the AstraZeneca (AZD1222) vaccine in a few weeks from the COVAX facility. These doses would suffice to inoculate up to 60,000 citizens of which priority would be given to frontline healthcare workers. Pregnant women and children under the age of 18 would not receive any jabs just yet.
According to interim guidance coming from the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) at its extraordinary meeting on February 8, further studies are planned in pregnant women in the coming months, including a pregnancy sub-study and a pregnancy registry.
Please permit me space in your newspaper to respond to a missive on social media written by APNU+AFC’s Juretha Fernandes MP, where she sought to discredit Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo’s assertions that public servants would receive a salary increase.
In the VP’s Facebook post he stated that there is over $10 billion under the head “revision of wages of salaries” which caters for salary increases. To counter, Ms. Fernandes was adamant that there is no mention of this heading in any of the three budget estimate volumes. She then concluded that “the 2021 budget did not cater for any increase, revision or otherwise, in public servants wages and salaries. But the PPP must now find a way to fix such a grave omission in an attempt to salvage their tarnished public image.”
Now here are the facts: Ms. Fernandes is partially correct - those specific words, “revision of wages of salaries”, do not appear in the budget estimates. What the MP ought to have known is that the line item 6141 to which the vice president refers was changed from “revision of wages of salaries” to “other employment costs” in 2014. As such, she should have examined this line to ascertain whether funds were budgeted before coming to a conclusion.
Extracted from 2014 Budget estimates Volume 1
Secondly, there was no omission – and absolutely no need to fix anything. In the 2021 Budget estimates, under the same 6141 line item, $10,094,889,000 i.e. as correctly stated by the VP over $10 billion is budgeted for salary increases.