Seek and Save a failure, says De Peiza

President of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), attorney-at-law Verla De Peiza, has described as a failure the ‘Operation Seek and Save’ initiative, which was intended to gather health-related data from communities across the island and assist the Government in getting a better handle on the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Sunday night, during a virtual panel discussion hosted by the DLP on the topic ‘The Two Sides of COVID in Barbados’, De Peiza argued that the overall number of positive cases found through the Seek and Save initiative, paled in comparison to the average daily cases that have been recorded.

Two weeks ago, Chairman of the Cabinet’s COVID-19 Sub-committee, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Dr. Jerome Walcott, providing an update on the programme, stated that they had at the time covered 62,000 households and identified 168 suspicious cases. He went on to say that 236 rapid antigen tests and 197 PCR tests had been performed, from which they had seen 18 positive tests results from 218 tests.

“...It is a minuscule percentage that has been found by this programme. I certainly haven’t had anyone visit my house as yet and as far as I’m aware, the programme is over,” the DLP leader said.

De Peiza explained that from her understanding, there was going to be large-scale testing of households, but what really occurred was a large-scale interviewing of households. The DLP head said that this approach was flawed as it was dependent on persons providing “honest, forthright and upfront” answers to strangers about their intimate medical knowledge and testing was based on that.

“So I was disappointed that we were not, as we were told, going to be going into the communities with the rapid antigen tests to use that as a precursor to weed out those who needed to have the PCR test to determine the level of community spread, at least to some degree. But what we got instead was what really should have happened, and that is the National Census ... since we were having a household canvass. I think that would have been a more reasonable position for householders to appreciate, if you are bringing them to our doorstep do the Census one time and done,” she added.

The political leader continued, “But if it is that the medical team is not following through with those antigen tests, even if it’s just a sampling in a household. So if you didn’t test everybody in the household, but you said this is a household of six, let me test two. [But] none of that, so therefore, I can only conclude that it was a failure.”

Speaking moments earlier, the party’s spokesperson on health, Paul Gibson, was also critical of the programme. He said even though there were some positive persons identified, there was the likelihood that they did not get to Harrison Point in a timely fashion, given the challenges the Government was experiencing transporting persons to the isolation facility.

“...The plan had to be synchronised and it was not synchronised,” he lamented.

The health spokesperson added, “COVID is the clear and present danger in Barbados and it’s not being taken seriously and that came out in this Seek and Save exercise. It did not yield the fruit that it was supposed to yield and put those young people in danger.”

He alluded that while the students from The University of the West Indies who carried out the surveys were wearing masks and face shields, they needed more personal protective equipment to properly protect them, given the number of people they would have come into contact with.

“The UK cancelled all such activities in the UK; they said, ‘No, stop.’ We should have done the same thing,” Gibson maintained. (JRT)