Bus crawl ‘a smokescreen’ – DLP leader

Leader of the Democratic Labour Party Verla De Peiza has accused Government of using the COVID-19 super spreader Brandy and Punnany bus crawl event as a smokescreen.

De Peiza who was speaking during a virtual panel discussion entitled COVID-19: Time to Reset, which was staged Sunday night, claimed that the bus crawl was a “secondary event” and that that is where the focus needs to be.

She said: “It is a smokescreen only to focus on a bus crawl. Up until that time, there were many social events. That same day there was a different kind of mass gathering involving a different type of transport a more upscale type of transport. It was on the sea and on the beach and using pleasure craft, yachts, using catamarans.”

The DLP president claimed that she was reliably informed that a prison officer, who did not attend the bus crawl, had tested positive for the virus ahead of the December 26 event.

She declared: “We are asked to focus in on what really is a secondary event. The information coming out of the prison is that the first prison officer to test positive had been on sick leave from before Christmas. He was on sick leave already and did not attend the bus crawl.

“And if that information is correct that focus that we are asked to have on a bus crawl is simply to put blinkers on us so that we are not paying attention to the real issue. And perhaps that is why they can’t find patient zero because they are focusing on a secondary issue.”

De Peiza said the 113 inmates now infected had also not been on the bus crawl and many of them were “nervous”. She said that health officials need to identify the root of the COVID-19 outbreak at Her Majesty’s Prison Dodds.

“They are not opening up themselves to the possibility that something happened before that bus crawl that is the critical event,” she said.

“Yes, the bus crawl spread it, but no prisoner went on the bus crawl and 113 of them in the first batch.  Those inmates calling are frantic. The last time there was a major outbreak in the prison it was chicken pox and virtually 100 per cent of the inmate population contracted it. They are justifiably nervous.”

De Peiza said attention must be paid to the “other breaches” which took place before the bus crawl. She called on Government to name those involved in the West Coast cluster the same way they identified the bus crawl.

The DLP leader said: “The fact of the matter is that there were serious and significant breaches occurring before the bus crawl that very likely fed into that as a secondary event but we can’t hear them being outed.

“Yet we can’t get any details about the other two, admitted only on questioning, the other two clusters that we have only been told have been on the West Coast. We do not know where, how, when and with whom.” (IMC)