- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 08/Jul 04:18

Unacceptable error

THE VACCINATION card mix-up that undid this country’s participation in a recent youth athletic meet in Nicaragua is the type of embarrassing blunder that should not be allowed to happen again. Imagine training for months, possibly years, to represent your country on the international stage. Imagine taking all the personal steps and making all the sacrifices required to do so. Then imagine turning up at the airport on the day your team is due to depart, only to be told by airline officials that you cannot board the plane. Disappointment is not the word. For local athletes, young and old, this is the stuff of nightmares. What a waste. In explaining what led to a group of eight teenagers missing the North American, Central American and Caribbean Athletic Association (NACAC)’s Under-13 and Under-15 Age Group Championships, held July 5-6, local officials have blamed Nicaraguan organisers. The “error,” said the National Association of Athletics Administrations (NAAA), “was made in classifying TT in a travel category that did not require vaccination for entry into Nicaragua.” That’s no excuse. It takes a few seconds to search entry requirements online. Just as NAAA discovered the mistake “following immediate discussions” after the teenagers were turned away, a conversation could have been had to clarify any uncertainty long before. Making matters worse is the fact that all the children involved, who were from Tobago, were already immunised. They could have been advised to walk with their vaccination cards as a precaution. They were not. What stood in their way from track and field glory was, sadly, not their global competitors but their own local shepherds who failed to tell them to walk with their paperwork, just in case. Admittedly, the Nicaraguans could have been expected to know best their own laws. They might have been fortified in their mistaken belief that this country is not a “high-risk” one given the fact that only Trinidad maintains enzootic areas for yellow fever, not necessarily Tobago. But local officials should have still known better. They certainly should not have taken the word of foreigners as gospel over that of, say, the local Ministry of Health which, just last year, had cause to issue a spate of yellow fever notices to property owners as a precaution. In 2021, at the height of covid19, health officials also placed the country on alert for yellow fever because, at that stage, local vaccine coverage was at 89.2 per cent, below the WHO threshold of 95. A wave of vaccine scepticism may have worsened this since. What this incident ultimately shows is that a kind of complacency, despite the lessons of the pandemic as it relates to international travel, now seems all too common. The post Unacceptable error appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.