Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith has heard Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s call for in­creased polic­ing of bars af­ter it was dis­cov­ered some of the cas­es of the lat­est wave of COVID-19 in­fec­tions were con­tract­ed in such es­tab­lish­ments. How­ev­er, Grif­fith says he will not stop there as his sights are al­so now trained on po­lit­i­cal mo­tor­cades which have mor­phed in­to “mo­bile bars.”

In a brief tele­phone in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Grif­fith said the po­lice’s du­ty is to up­hold the laws of the coun­try and the man­date for reg­u­lat­ing the op­er­a­tions of bars is set out in the pub­lic health reg­u­la­tions.

How­ev­er, with the Au­gust 10 Gen­er­al Elec­tion just four days away, Grif­fith said po­lit­i­cal mo­tor­cades have al­so been a prob­lem.

He said re­ports reach­ing him in­di­cate that mo­tor­cades have been fea­tur­ing scores of peo­ple con­gre­gat­ing out­side of ve­hi­cles con­sum­ing al­co­hol and en­gag­ing in the same be­hav­iour that bars are known for. If this be­hav­iour con­tin­ues over the next few days, he said the mo­tor­cades will al­so be “shut down.”

Speak­ing dur­ing a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Row­ley said the po­lice will be asked, through Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Stu­art Young, to in­crease their scruti­ny of bars - en­sur­ing stricter ad­her­ence to the guide­lines.

He said this was is in light of in­for­ma­tion from the Min­istry of Health’s con­tact trac­ing ex­er­cise which re­vealed some of the lat­est cas­es of COVID-19 were trans­mit­ted at bars.

This was con­firmed by Di­rec­tor of the Health at the Min­istry of Health’s Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion, Dr Av­ery Hinds, dur­ing yes­ter­day’s COVID-19 press con­fer­ence.

“What we have not­ed is that the trans­mis­sions that we saw be­tween cas­es and pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary con­tacts were in par­tic­u­lar set­tings,” Hinds said as he gave an up­date on the min­istry’s con­tact trac­ing ex­er­cise on 22 peo­ple who had con­tract­ed the virus in the past 15 days.

“With­in the house­hold set­ting, we saw that there was a high­er risk of trans­mis­sion and a fair amount of su­per spread­ing events...were not­ed among per­sons who had con­tact with that bar set­ting. At least two or three bars so far have been im­pli­cat­ed in the spread from one group to an ap­par­ent­ly un­re­lat­ed group of per­sons.”

Hinds not­ed that this trans­mis­sion to ap­par­ent “un­re­lat­ed” groups of peo­ple was clar­i­fied when his­toric da­ta was tak­en from them.

“So we’re see­ing, in par­tic­u­lar where bars con­tribute to that. The school set­ting where stu­dents were close to­geth­er where there is an ac­tu­al case with­in a class­room set­ting- we did see where that hap­pened,” Hinds said. —Rishard Khan