COVID-19: Ports to remain open, for now

The Government will keep both ports of entry opened for as long as the COVID-19 pandemic allows, Prime Minister Mia Mottley said tonight.

She said in a live interview on national television that the livelihood of tens of thousands of Barbadians depends heavily on the country’s borders being opened for business.

In explaining the potential impact, Mottley singled out the British tourist market: “This is so much more dependent on the UK, the taxi drivers, the hotel workers, the people working in laundries, the people working in restaurants.

“Think of how many tens of thousands of people in this country are going to be affected, once the borders closed.

“Now we accept that we’re dealing with a disease outbreak that will affect probably three to eight out of every thousand in a fatal way. But we may, in fact, affect far, far more if we immediately close our borders, ensuring that people who depend on a weekly wage or for whom this is the only source of income may not be able to feed themselves, may not be able to buy what they need day to day to sustain their families.”

The Prime Minister sought to remind the television audience that as a small island of 166 square miles almost everything that the country uses and does has an international component.

Mottley said: “We’ve been in conversation with the various airlines to more prescreening, but we’re also conscious that in any event, that there are decisions that people can make on their own. We believe we have to follow the science.

“We recognize, however, that the news cycle has also triggered people to take more decisions that may not necessarily be rooted in the science.

“And therefore, to some extent, what we are also facing is decisions that are taken by countries that can feed themselves, countries that have the capacity to do whatever they need to do to sustain equipment and a whole host of other things that people may need for day to day living.”

But she said that if a decision is to be made about closing the borders that the Social Partnership would have to be engaged.

She added: “Ultimately, if we get to that stage, we will get there not by reason of the Government making a decision alone, but because we have gone and we’ve consulted all of the stakeholders over the course of the last ten days, we have been in almost daily consultation with stakeholders.”

She continued: “But I think tomorrow and we expect that we would like to be able to meet with as many stakeholders who depend on the borders being open by Wednesday evening. And if the country says that this is a win that we’re prepared to take, in spite of the fact that it will bring untold hardship to large numbers of people and we’re talking thousands of people rather than us recognizing, as has been recognized elsewhere, that it is critical to build up hospital capacity. That and base hospital capacity.

“We don’t mean the Queen Elizabeth Hospital because we have taken a decision to isolate Queen Elizabeth Hospital for the treatment of persons with COVID-19 as far as possible.”

She told the CBC TV interviewer that she was not aware of the announcement earlier this evening by Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley that the nation’s borders were to be closed Monday night, declining to comment further.

But Mottley explained that uncertainty posed a major challenge to the decision-making on COVID-19.

The Prime Minister said: “Part of the difficulty with closing the borders or even with doing all of these other things is that the Ministry of Health, PAHO/WHO have been consistent in telling us they do not know when this will end.

“Now, you can’t close down things without knowing when you’re going to be able to open them back up easily, particularly since they’ve said that this will come in two or three distinct waves.”

“And therefore, the question for us has always been, will more people be affected negatively in a major way from closing the borders than from screening properly ahead of time, making sure that we do the temperature checks for people coming into Barbados, making sure that we are not added to that declarations.”