To assist with reducing the present COVID-19 spike in the territory, residents are being urged to stay at home if they do not have to attend work or utilise any of the essential services.
This message comes from the Minister for Health Carvin Malone who made the appeal during a recent press conference.
The minister said by minimizing movement and gatherings of residents, this will help in breaking the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, which has now surpassed 1300 active infections across the BVI.
He said, “We are encouraging everyone to stay at home. This is apparent, we have to break this transmission. If you have no other particular cause other than work, supermarket, doctors, we are asking you to stay at home. Stay within the confines so that we can break this transmission.”
The only way to prevent curfews
Minister Malone said the aforementioned measure is the sole practice that would prevent his government from reimplementing curfews across the territory.
“This is the only way that we’re going to do this without the implementation of curfews. This is the only way we’re going to do this and have our Public Health people assist in the contact tracing. We are down now to, I’m told just to two Public Health persons to assist with the contact tracing because the other members have been declared positive for COVID. So they themselves have to isolate,” he stated.
Environmental Health Department to increase staff
Meanwhile, the health minister also encouraged the Environmental Health Department to increase their patrols of the communities in the territory.
He said to assist with facilitating this demand, the department was given the nod to increase its staff size to get the job done.
“We have asked for the Environmental Health Department to have additional staff. Beef up your staff even more so that those businesses who are intent on having the particular crowd size violated, we would bring whether it’s $5,000 or $10,000 fines into play immediately. We are intent on those persons who will not wear their mask to be ticketed so that we can then have the particular freedom that we had,” Minister Malone explained.