Minister of Health and Wellness, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bostic (left), speaking to the media yesterday while Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kenneth George, looks on.
‘LAST RESORT’
Minister of Health and Wellness, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bostic, says though there is a concern about the number of new COVID-19 cases, a lockdown is not being contemplated at this time.
He stated this yesterday while speaking on the sidelines of a donation by Massy companies in Barbados, in conjunction with the Massy Foundation (Barbados). They provided the financial support to the COVID-19 Immunisation Programme, for the purchase of 27 purpose-built Dell Latitude 5420 Rugged Laptop computers, for use in the national vaccination programme.
“I have said before and I will repeat, we are nowhere near a lockdown. Lockdown is the last resort and we will gradually, and we have started that obviously with the curfew and other things, to increase our public health interventions and non-pharmaceutical interventions that we have been introducing like the curfew and the limitation on numbers and so.”
Bostic said the increase in the number of COVID-19 cases was anticipated.
“If you start with the 40 positives on one day, we anticipate a certain number of cases as a result of that. Why? Because we have been doing aggressive contact tracing and we have been testing large numbers. For the last several days, the numbers would have been close to or surpassing 1,000. So yes, we anticipated that we will get cases and that is not an issue.”
He continued, “We are seeing one or two cases coming up that are not connected to the major clusters and that is concern for us. It means that we have a bit more work to do, but at this point in time we are not contemplating a lockdown.” (MG)