Covid19 cases involving children are on the rise which is one of the reasons the government and health officials are encouraging parents and guardians to allow their charges to get vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine.

On Saturday at a press conference at the Diplomatic Centre in St Ann's, principal medical officer Dr Maryam Abdool-Richards said three children made up the 49 severely ill patients in the parallel health care system.

'We have had a slight uptick in the number of the paediatric cases especially in the South West RHA (Regional Health Authority) which covers San Fernando and the southern region. And there are currently three severely ill children that are hospitalised as confirmed covid positive cases. This is a new development that we have noticed.'

She added that samples for genotyping testing were taken to determine if the virus the children had was the original or a variant.

The increase comes as the government is pushing to get secondary school-aged children back in schools by the start of the new school year in September.

The Prime Minister said one of his biggest concerns was allowing children to return to school. If secondary school were to open, forms five and six students would return first followed by forms two, three, and four.

He said the government's first priority was to vaccinate secondary school-aged children whether they attended school or not. Reopening primary and nursery schools was not yet a consideration.

He reiterated that Pfizer was the only brand of covid19 vaccine authorised by the World Health Organization for children ages 12 to 18. TT received 305,000 doses of the vaccine from the US on Thursday.

'Today I want to appeal to all parents, guardians, cousins, loved ones and friends, let us as a people do everything that we have to do to protect our children who should be in school some time soon," said Dr Rowley.

'I am hoping and I'm trusting that the vast majority of the parents in TT in 2021 in the covid pandemic, while your children are healthy, and while your government has got the vaccines to protect your children, that you would listen to the health department and protect your children as we have done for decades.'

He asked the ministries of health and education to review the vaccination programme as it would begin next week. He wanted a 'significant portion' of the school population to be vaccinated but did not have a target that would indicate whether or not schools would be allowed to open.

Chief Medical Officer Dr Roshan Parasram said, 'We would like 100 per cent of them to be vaccinated. We know that is not a practical and reasonable thing to expect but we want the majority of the population to be vaccinated. Because of the way children interact and because of the environment itself there is a higher risk of spread from one person to the next.'

He said the more children were vaccinated, the sooner schools would be opened regardless of the epidemiological situation. However, if the number of vaccinated adolescents was low, school reopening w