BOSTIC: No community spread

Rumours and rumblings of community spread of the COVID-19 pandemic were dismissed yesterday by Minister of Health and Wellness Colonel Jeffrey Bostic, who informed the island of yet another COVID-19 cluster. Speaking during a media conference at the ministry’s Culloden Road headquarters, Minister Bostic revealed the details surrounding a situation which has seen six family members all turning in positive test results in recent days.

A housekeeper and five other members of her family are now wards of the Harrison Point Isolation Facility, after several days of aggressive contact tracing. With the cluster being traced back to a Barbadian woman who returned from the United Kingdom on September 19th and who tested positive for COVID-19 after a second test on September 24th, the housekeeper and her nephew were first to test positive on September 30th. On October 2nd, her niece, niece’s husband and their four month-old baby were diagnosed, while another niece – a 15-year-old student of the Ellerslie School, tested positive on Saturday.

Speaking to members of the media, Minister Bostic was quick to defend the island’s status on community spread, noting that every case diagnosed in Barbados was traced and that rigorous contact tracing was going to continue. “This is the third time a cluster has been identified since the start of the outbreak in Barbados, and as in the other two instances, the public health officers are carrying out their investigations diligently so as to stem the spread. The fact that we have been able to identify these cases so quickly means that we are able to isolate the patients and limit their contact with other members of the community. I assure residents that there is still no evidence of community spread of COVID-19 in Barbados since as long as we are able to trace the source of the infection, as we have in this case, we are able to bring the situation under control,” he said.

With territories such as the United Kingdom being upgraded to ‘high-risk’ as of October 1st, Minister Bostic explained that there was no hard and fast way to treat the ever-evolving situation. “We have protocols in place which are not cast in stone because we are fighting against a virus and we are confronting a situation that is very fluid, and we have to respond to the fluidity of the situation. As a result of that, we have been amending protocols as situations develop and in this particular case, I have to tell you that there were no cracks in the protocols,” he said before going on to explain the rationale behind the second test. “We then decided to implement a second test for persons from medium-risk countries because we saw some activity that made us feel that we needed to introduce such a test and we did so. So that is what happened on this occasion and that test is administered on Day-5, and that is how we were able to get this positive result, but the protocols were not breached in any way.”

Bostic stated that the local government was looking at all ways of minimising risks on our shores given that shutting down the island was not an option. “No country can prevent COVID from entering its borders. That’s a reality that we all have to live with, but the thing about it is to be able to manage the risks and that is exactly what we have been doing. From time to time we have been making changes to the protocols, recognising that we live in a COVID environment. We are not immune to having COVID here in Barbados but life must continue and we must learn to live with COVID and to manage the risks in order to facilitate the kind of life that we want to live,” he said.

Finishing up by assuring the public that there is no community spread and that there was an aggressive approach to containing any spread, Minister Bostic said that in the war against COVID, there were several lines of defence. Highlighting the borders as the first line, testing, isolation and quarantine as the second and the island’s frontline workers as the third, the career military man said that it was the last line of defence that will save us. “I want to say to all of us that the greatest line of defence is actually the last, and that has to do with each and every resident and citizen of this country following the protocols and doing what they are supposed to do. We, each of us, we are responsible for our own safety in this COVID era,” he said.