PdP says Govt needs to do more to shield the country

Barbadians should not be blamed for the current spike in COVID-19 cases on the island!

That is the view of Opposition Leader Reverend Joseph Atherley, who says he is disappointed in the manner in which Prime Minister Mia Mottley spoke to the nation as she recently announced strict measures ot combat the further spread of local COVID-19 cases.

During her live address last Friday, Mottley maintained that this was not the time to play the blame game.

However, Atherley contended that the Prime Minister had done just that.

“I am disappointed with the Prime Minister’s tone for much of the press briefing in the last one that they gave because it seems to me that she was about clearly placing blame on the shoulders of Barbadians for the spread of this thing.

“You can’t in one breath say that this is not a blame game and that is not what we should be engaging in and then at the same time say Bajans are to blame for this and not our visitors. Truth be told, the Government has to take a huge bit of responsibility for the situation,” Atherley said.

“Now the attempt to blame it on a bus crawl, I do not know if that is necessarily fully justified. Somebody must have given it to somebody that went on that bus crawl. We’ve also had some major public events in recent weeks that concerned me. We saw at the Garrison [Savannah], we saw beach events, we saw restaurant events and even as far back as the by-election in St George, we saw signals being sent clearly to the Barbadian populace that would only induce a sense of complacency. So I am saying Government has much of the blame to bear for what is happening here.”

Atherley suggested that in an effort to contain COVID-19 Government should contemplate shutting down the country for “a few weeks”.

He maintained that Government was not properly monitoring the behaviour of visitors to the island, and as such, those from high-risk countries should be prohibited from entering Barbados for the time being.

“Now if you are going to continue to have your borders open and flights coming in here especially out of the UK, then you’ve got to make sure that you have stringent regulations and prohibitions in place to ensure that people do not breach quarantine and isolation arrangements. Now when you have people self-isolating, people going to some private villas and some commercial private accommodation arrangements, but yet they are not adhering to the protocols and the restrictions that they are supposed to be abiding under, you have problems,” Atherley said.

“We need really to get on top of it, get a hold of it. We need to rein it in, pull it back and to me the country needs to do a little bit more than we are doing right now to address that situation because even as we go to curfew 9 to 5, we’ve still got flights coming in from high-risk places everyday…If you’re going to keep your borders open and I’m not so sure that you should have them open all now, maybe you should pause that for a couple of weeks as well, but if you’re going to have people coming in from high-risk areas, you’ve got to make sure that the quarantine and isolation arrangements are fool-proof. You have to enforce it with stringent scrutiny and monitoring and stringent penalties for people who breach it.”

The Opposition Leader said he was also concerned about the possibility of the new COVID-19 variant being in Barbados.

He also suggested the two bank holidays pronounced by Mottley would not be enough to “get on top of the situation”.

(randybennett@barbadostoday.bb)