Trinidad & Tobago is a small country led by a volcanologist that recently managed to wrestle their active COVID-19 cases down to one. The secret to their success is widely available to everyone on Earth.
Time.
No matter how small or under-resourced you are, if you act early and act fast, that gives you massive leverage over a pandemic.
Here’s how.
Test/Trace/Isolate
The basic epidemiological playbook is not complicated or new. Test/trace/isolate has been the mantra for hundreds of years, with the only major advance being PCR testing rather than just eyeballing the sick. If you catch and quarantine any epidemic early enough, you can get it down.
That’s what Trinidad and Tobago did.
The key insight here is when they did it. Unlike ‘developed’ countries that waited until there were thousands of cases, Trinidad and Tobago reacted fast. This gave them — a small, under-resourced nation — a massive amount of leverage.
They got the same WHO advice as everybody, including America. They just listened to it. When the local WHO body offered reagents and knowledge, they took it. And so they were ready.
