Bajan habits hard to curb, says Czar

COVID-19 CZAR Richard Carter has admitted that trying to curb the behavioural practices of Barbadians has been his biggest challenge.

The island has been under lockdown since March 28, when an initial 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew was implemented.

It has since been extended to a 24-hour curfew and Carter said it has been extremely difficult trying to keep people inside their homes during that period.

“This has been perhaps the most difficult aspect of what we’ve tried to do. We’ve tried to remind people that even when you yourself may not be at serious risk in terms of a young person, for example, who gets affected by COVID-19, we know that about 80 per cent of the cases are mild, so mild that large numbers of people are asymptomatic or very mildly symptomatic and may not even know they have COVID-19, but you have a mother, you have an aunt, you have a grandmother or grandfather and the risk for them is considerably elevated.

“All of the deaths we have seen of COVID-19 in Barbados are of elderly people and in one or two cases infected by persons younger than themselves, so that is part of what we have tried to communicate,” Carter said during an interview on various media platforms this afternoon.

“Disobedience and the natural tendency that some people have to try to flout rules, that is not simply putting yourself at risk, it is putting members of your own family at risk. We saw from very early, as soon as the restrictions were announced videos of young people stating their intent to disobey and so that is a message we have tried to communicate to young people.”

Carter, who worked in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak, however, said this was not the first time he had encountered such stubborn attitudes.

He said during the Ebola outbreak it had also been difficult in trying to curb the practices of Africans, especially as it related to treating the dead.

“They’ve been lessons from Ebola. Under Ebola, persons were not allowed to touch their own relatives who died because it was immediately after death that the body was at its most infectious. So here you had a society that believes that if you don’t send off your ancestors or your loved ones in an appropriate way by washing and preparing the body, that body roams in the afterlife forever and torments you,” the Czar explained.

“How do you get people to a part where they don’t touch their dead bodies, where they don’t touch their children if they are ill?

“That was a huge battle and similarly in Barbados we are asking people to do things that are not in their natural instinct, we are asking people to do things that are contrary to what they’ve had and enjoyed for a long period of time. We are fortunate to live in a society that provides us immense freedoms, but those freedoms are the very things that something like the coronavirus can exploit,” Carter maintained.