Grocery plan in works, says Czar

Government officials and food retailers are actively trying to come up with a plan to make sure that households can be replenished with goods and essentials, COVID-19 Czar Richard Carter said tonight.

He was speaking on the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) TV 8 evening news programme.

Carter said: “Those discussions have been going on. As of today, I was in a meeting of the sub-committee of Cabinet with a number of the retailers and distributors discussing the best means by which we can meet the needs of the population obviously for food particularly as we go into the Easter weekend but particularly also because there has been a period of restriction over the past couple of days.

“So we have two critical things to address. One, the obvious need to ensure that the population has access to food and to do that in a way that is commercially appropriate but secondly to address the challenge of ensuring that we do not see a repeat of the scenes of chaos and basically people engaging in large crowds around the supermarkets and not meeting the public health requirements of physical distancing.”

The Prime Minister-appointed Czar complained that some people were trying to obtain curfew passes by fraudulently claiming to be taking care of elderly people.

He said: “We have introduced a number of passes for persons who are looking after the elderly persons providing care but even here we have seen abuse of this.

“We have seen persons approaching the Minister of People Empowerment and the Elder Affairs [Cynthia Forde] trying to get passes and when the investigations are done those have proven to be illegitimate persons seeking to get these passes not necessarily to look after elderly folk but basically for whatever other means they have.”

Carter also said there is still way too much traffic on the road and urged people to stay at home.

He said: “I have seen the traffic on the road today and over the past couple of days and you would not believe that Barbados is under a 24-hour curfew.

“Persons are only supposed to be leaving their homes if they are going to do shopping or banking or picking up medication but when you compare the roads of Barbados with the roads of big metropolitan cities you see a completely different picture.”