The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

We all tend to think that everyone exists as we do, and although we know better, we often make life decisions based upon our own life’s paradigm.

As the Bahamas is now ranked next to last, in the worldwide standings of Country Responses to COVID19, and knowing how a great many people still live in The Bahamas, (and we all know about the shanty towns) is it reasonable to even think, much less consider, that a very large proportions of our population can simply be told to go home and “self-isolate” when they are diagnosed positive and don’t need hospital care? Could this be the massive elephant in the room that nobody can see?

For a long time now people have been wondering why, with so many hotels empty, and so many cruise ships anchored idly in Bahamas waters, has the government not considered asking the owners to make one or two of these available as isolation stations.

How does anyone expect someone, living in a house with an out-house for a toilet, perhaps with one or two other family members, or even more, not to infect the others is beyond comprehension. Yet the daily dashboard gives us the numbers and they are not all in hospital. So they must be roaming around, and very likely with the rest of us.

When we had cholera and yellow fever years ago, a quarantine station was built on Athol Island, and those who contracted it were sent there. When people contracted leprosy they were confined to an isolation colony on Carmichael Road.

Surely the time is now when something of this nature were put in place. If the reason that such is not being done, as we heard yesterday regarding “free testing”, “because the PLP is having pipe dreams” then maybe it’s time to appoint Mr Davis as the Competent Authority?

RUMPLESTILSKIN

Nassau,

October 29, 2020.