Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony, is appealing to local businesses to enforce the gazetted COVID-19 guidelines.
During Thursday’s COVID-19 update, the health minister said ensuring adherence is everyone’s responsibility.
“This thing is not about government alone, this is about everybody working together to make sure all of us are safe, if we don’t do that, what we will end up with is that numbers will continue to increase and we will see more cases of hospitalisation and more cases of death.
“This is in our hands to control, but that control has to do with our behaviour and adherence to these measures, if we fail to do that then the consequences are going to be the increase in cases, hospitalisation and deaths, it’s self-evident, we have to really start waking up,” Minister Anthony urged the public.
The health minister noted that these responsibilities also fall on business owners and operators.
“These various business entities whether they want to have an event with people, they should work along with the Task Force so that those measures can be put in place.
“Right now, we have put certain measures, for example, if you are coming into a business premises you have to show your vaccination card and really, we have to get the business owners to enforce these things, if they don’t want to enforce it, then, in the end, all of us would suffer,” Dr. Anthony noted.
To this end, the health minister reiterated his call for everyone to be personally responsible and not put themselves at risk of contracting COVID-19.
“The task force would work to enforce measures, measures including restrictions of number of people gathering, talking to people about social distancing, getting people to comply with mask-wearing. But while the task force would try to do this, it’s really each one of us who would have to change our behaviour to make sure that we would be in compliance with those measures. Because for the Task Force to run behind every single person to see whether they wearing a mask or not, that’s going to be quite a challenging endeavour.”
Minister Anthony reminded that the Delta variant is more contagious, noting that persons are at greater risk when in public.
As of Wednesday, 341,600 or 66.6 percent of the adult population have taken their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, while 176,695 or 34.4 percent of the adult population have been fully vaccinated. For children 12 to 17 years old, 19,686 or 27 percent of that age group have been administered the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
