Declaring that the “real enemy” was community spread of the highly contagious Delta variant rather than visitors to Barbados, the Minister of Health on Friday robustly defended the decision to ease protocols for fully-vaccinated in-bound travellers.
Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bostic had announced on Thursday that effective Sunday, fully inoculated travellers who can show proof of a negative PCR test result on arrival here, would no longer have to be tested again and quarantined and can go straight to their homes or hotels.
But in light of an immediate backlash from some commentators, Lt Col Bostic told a press conference that the move to relax those protocols was based on the fact that the overwhelming majority of COVID-19 cases were coming from within communities here.
He said that the battle against the virus, which on Thursday exceeded the 400-mark of positive cases for the first time and killed 124 people so far, had now shifted from the ports of entry to communities.
Lt Col Bostic explained that Government had been concentrating its resources at the ports of entry in order to control or try to prevent the importation of the disease, but has since found that less than one per cent of all positive cases are travellers arriving in Barbados compared to nearly all from within the country itself.
“We have to fight the battle where the battle has to be fought,” said the health minister. “I am advised that when the number of cases coming from travellers account for about 10 per cent of your case incidence, that that is when countries generally are expected and encouraged to tighten protocols. For the last three months or so, we have not been seeing a lot of positives coming out of Grantley Adams International Airport.
“And I can give you an example or two. In August we would have had about 18,000 persons visiting and we had a positivity rate of persons with non-Barbadian ID cards of less than one per cent. In fact, 0.66 per cent. [In] September and October, less than one per cent: 0.53 and 0.46 per cent. That is what we have been seeing coming out of the travellers coming into Barbados.”
He also pointed out that even some of those cases are people who reside here, but are non-nationals who do not carry Barbadian ID cards. The Minister of Health noted that some of the cases are also travellers who would have tested positive for the test which they require to get back into their country or other destination.
“And interestingly enough, if you look at the number of positive cases we have been having over the last six weeks or so, and you decided you would have utilized one day’s result, I want to put it to you that one day’s result of positive cases of the community transmission for persons who reside in Barbados, accounted for more than the total cases for one month for persons travelling into the country,” Lt Col Bostic argued.
“So we are faced with a situation where the main thrust, the main effort, the main battle that we’ve been fighting for months which really was at the airport, the port-of-entry; because the focus, the aim at that point in time was to try to keep the virus out of the country; keep the variants out of the country or delay them, because we always recognized that we were not going to be able to stop COVID from entering this country.
“So that was the main effort. But when we move to a situation that we are in at this point of serious community transmission, the vast majority of our positive cases are within our communities…so our battlefield has shifted from the port-of-entry to the communities. We do not have infinite resources in this country. Our human resource capacity is stretched at this time because of this surge that we are experiencing; and also our material resources…this is a protracted war.”
He explained that it was therefore a “simple” task of determining exactly where the main effort had to be placed which turns out to be in the communities and community testing resulting from the high incidence of cases recorded over the last “several” days.
“So that it would have been foolhardy to leave a vital asset at the airport to test people that are yielding a very low positivity rate, when the real issue that we have is within our communities,” said Lt Col Bostic. So the decision was taken to reallocate some of those resources; the vast majority to the community to be able to carry out the testing and perhaps the increased testing that would result from the numbers that we have.”
The minister told journalists that another factor which motivated the decision to relax the travel protocols and focus on the communities was seeing the long lines and large numbers of people snaking around the various testing sites, a state of affairs he said “was not a comfortable feeling for me, not from a public health perspective nor from the perspective of trying to make things comfortable for Barbadians who have to utilize those services”.
He also explained that he feared that many of those standing in line, sometimes for long periods, and who may have been primary contacts, might have become tired of waiting and decided to return home and potentially infect their families.
Lt Col Bostic cautioned that his ministry would reverse the newly-changed travel protocols if it were deemed necessary.
He revealed that as part of the new shift in strategy, there is going to be an expansion of testing sites with an additional two or three including Queen’s Park. The others are to be announced later.
“We have to go in that direction to take some of the load off some of the major testing sites, two polyclinics and the [Wildey] Gymnasium; and we also have to engage the services in some instances, of our private sector partners for them to be able to assist with testing to reduce the numbers, reduce the waiting time and also to take some of the burden off of the resources that we have at our disposal,” he revealed.
emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb
