‘Tightening up’ may be required, says Health Minister

MINISTER of Health and Wellness, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bostic, has hinted that additional measures may be coming this week as health officials announced that there is community spread in the country.

His comments came on Saturday evening during a press briefing held at Ilaro Court where he gave an update on the new cases and recoveries reported in the country.

During the press conference when asked about measures to be adopted now that the community spread has been identified in the country, Minister Bostic said, “You would understand and appreciate that I am the Minister of Health and Wellness and that there are some of the measures that are not only related to health and wellness, but there are other ministries that are involved and certainly at the level of the Social Partnership there is some consultations that have to take place.”

As such, he said he would be unable to give a timeframe as to when these new measures will be adopted.

“What I can say, of course given the situation we are facing at the moment, that there is some tightening up that is required from next week, but those matters will be discussed.”

He explained that while public health officials did not previously consider that there was community spread after greater analysis over the last few days and in consultation with the medical professionals who are doing the contact tracing, that thinking has changed.

The decision, he said, has been predicated on the fact that they still have not been able to link some of the cases to any of the existing clusters or to any previous positive case.

“We will continue the contact tracing with the others, but in terms of linkages for those cases where we have exhausted our efforts in terms of finding a link... based on the public health officials’ reporting, we have reached the stage where we believe and we are declaring that there is community transmission in Barbados. This is a situation which we have discussed with the Pan American Health Organisation and we have informed them of our decision to do so,” he stated.

In relation to where the spread of cases can be located on the island, Minister Bostic noted that they are mostly in the southern and western areas of the country.

“The southern part that is where we are seeing the majority of cases, but there are cases in other parts of the north. We would have spoken for example to cases coming from St. Lucy; there would have been cases in St. Peter, but the numbers that we are seeing are predominantly in the southern part of the country and in the western part of the country.”

He noted that a number of linkages have been made. “There is no question about that. So that I would have said at a previous conference that we were able to determine that this matter would have originated on the west coast and then it went to other institutions like the prison, the bus crawl and so on. And that there were two persons from the west coast cluster who had interacted with about 25 or 30 of the positive cases that were spread throughout other groupings. So clearly there are links that have been made,” he said. (JH)

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