COVID-19 watchdog eyes City shopping mall as potential ‘super-spreader’

The Government’s COVID-19 watchdog has zeroed in on the bustling Swan Street shopping thoroughfare as a potentially explosive spreader of the virus.

“We have been seeing a worrying trend developing in Swan Street where you have a number of persons who gather there,” c, head of the COVID-19 Monitoring Unit told Barbados TODAY. “Swan Street is one of those areas where a lot of people go shopping…. There are a lot of crowds and so on. We will be looking into that to see what we can do about that.”

He did not elaborate on the likely restrictions to be introduced to the busy street mall.

Chapman said it is not good sense for people to spend their time in a crowded area just liming.

“I know we want to be close to one another and so on, but it is something that we will be looking into and see if we can help minimize the risk in places like that,” he said.

Chapman also revealed that more than a dozen protocol breakers are facing charges in court.

He said: “We have about 15 people before the law courts for different violations right now. In fact, they were put in early this week or late last week. Some of them were PSVs. What I will do is give you some sort of update where that is concerned once those hearings begin.”

But Chapman said that Barbadians were generally demonstrating a high level of compliance with the protocols.

“Given what we have been seeing, we are still seeing a pretty high level of compliance,” he told Barbados TODAY. “As with all things, it fluctuates. It tends to increase when cases increase and compliance tends to fall off when cases decrease. We see that on an ongoing basis. But overall I can say that we have not seen any significant falloff in the level of compliance overall.”

He nevertheless conceded that there are some spots which are causing some concern to his unit, highlighting the City as one such area.

Turning his attention to the conduct of Barbadians over the long bank holiday weekend, Chapman said he was pleased to see general adherence to the public health protocols.

“We did have one or two parties [and] we are presently doing our investigations on them. When the investigation is done we will be able to take the necessary action.

“What we would have seen is an increase in the number of persons at the beaches and picnic spots. As you would know, the directives allow for persons to go picnicking and maybe have a small lime, so those were not violations, but in some instances there were persons were without masks… and we would have had cause to speak to a couple. But, for the most part, they were well behaved.”

Chapman said his monitoring team was also looking into an event held over the weekend at Bushy Park for possible breaches of COVID-19 restrictions.

On Wednesday, 10 new COVID-19 cases were identified from 1,428 tests. Some 93 people are in isolation.

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb