The Tribune

By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

FORMER Health Minister Dr Marcus Bethel said the Minnis administration’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic “leaves much to be desired” and deserves “a poor rating”.

Dr Bethel, who served in a previous Progressive Liberal Party administration, said that over the past 16-18 months, the country’s leaders made many mistakes and missteps that could have been avoided.

“I say that because if one plans effectively and executes with precision one will get positive results. So failure to plan leads to a failure in execution,” he explained.

“I think that when we looked at over the past 18 months there’ve been many missteps along the way starting off in the beginning in the earlier stages where it appeared that the government of the day underestimated the severity of the pandemic and hence underfunded the response to what was needed to actually help mitigate the effect of the pandemic in The Bahamas.”

He made the comments on the talk show The Revolution with host Juan McCartney.

“In order to effectively manage these types of pandemics or epidemics requires adequate funding.

‘Funding provides for not only medical and nursing and support services which have to be ramped up dramatically but it also means the availability of supply chain supplies to face the pandemic head on.

“We found in the early stages that supplies were not available. Swabs were not available. Test kits were not available, etc. So these were the earliest missteps that put us behind the eight ball as they say.”

Then there was the issue of underfunding when it came to staffing, he said.

A nursing shortage is one of the biggest challenges being faced in the country’s healthcare system. Bahamas Nurses Union president Amancha Williams previously told The Tribune more than a dozen nurses have left Princess Margaret Hospital in the last few months.

Dr Bethel said: “Then as we went along, we underestimated the impact on the country’s healthcare resources so that we underfunded the staffing, the personnel.

“Last year some 40 doctors were let go from the PHA. Now they’ve had to call them back. These are missteps that happened because poor planning leads to poor execution and poor results and that is what we have had to face over the coming ensuing 18 months.”

Finally, he highlighted the dependency of nations giving us vaccines. The Bahamas has received vaccines from the World Health Organization’s COVAX Facility as well as countries such as the US and India.

“When the Ministry of Health (and) the ministers claimed that they had gone through COVAX to secure some 26,000 or an odd number of vaccines – that’s a fraction of the population of The Bahamas. We should’ve put the funding into acquiring vaccines in the quantity that would satisfy the population of The Bahamas. That was not done and so we’re sitting now waiting for India, the United States in addition to COVAX to provide vaccines for our population.”