PM says ‘equal treatment for quarantine-breakers’

The Government of Barbados will take all necessary actions against any person who brazenly breaks COVID-19 protocols whether they are Barbadian or not, the Prime Minister said Monday night.

The declaration came in a lengthy COVID-19 update from Ilaro Court as she addressed concerns circling social media over the weekend that visitors to the island were receiving an easy pass, if they were caught breaking protocols.

She said: “This Government is not going to favour anybody, and there is a lot of foolish talk out there about whether we are going to have two Barbadoses, let me address it up front. If Mia Mottley gets COVID tonight, tests positive tonight, I have to go Harrison’s Point tonight and not tomorrow night, 2 o’clock in the morning or 3 o’clock in the morning or whatever time the Barbados Defence Force can come to me.

“Clearly we have had to enhance a number of vehicles under the control of the [BDF] for carrying persons to Harrison’s Point because of the increase in numbers, clearly the prisoners have remained in the prisons, but let me also say that they are a number of people of all colours, black, white and Indian at Harrison’s Point tonight as we speak.”

The Prime Minister also defended her administration’s focus on the now infamous Boxing Day bus crawl, which has been declared a super-spreader event.

Mottley declared: “The bottom line is, when we spoke to the Bus Crawl last week, it was not from a punitive perspective, and I think I remember saying specifically that now is not the time for blame. We spoke to the bus crawl more from the point of view of getting persons to come forward and to allow us to get ahead of the virus, by finding out where it had gone.”

She  explained that because of the nature of the event, with the multiple stops it made along the course of the ride, health officials needed to quickly ascertain the number of people who would have been in primary and secondary contact of the event.

She rejected the notion, voiced by Barbadians on social media that visitors were getting better treatment at the expense of nationals. She said that the country has not yet come to terms with its complicated past with European nations, referring to the history of slavery and colonialism in a country that now welcomes predominantly white tourists to its shores today.

Mottley said: “This country has not yet come to term with issues pertaining to race, and that is one of the things that I have found as a Prime Minister of this country, and even as Minister of Culture under Owen Arthur when we did the National Commission on Reconciliation, that this is an ongoing piece of work.

“When you go through it systematically, we have not identified anybody because we want to put people out there as Bajans… I am a Bajan. In fact, everything I have done in my life has been to uplift this country, and let me be specific, to uplift black people.”

She pointed out that of the ten people so far who have faced the law courts over alleged breaches of quarantine, six were “non-Caribbean” people and four were Barbadian or other Caribbean nationals. (SB)