Akash Sama­roo

As the Gov­ern­ment de­lib­er­ates on the fu­ture of the State of Emer­gency, which will ex­pire at mid­night on Au­gust 29, pub­lic health pol­i­cy spe­cial­ist Dr Man­drek­er Ba­hall be­lieves the cur­few no longer serves its pur­pose and is now coun­ter­pro­duc­tive.

How­ev­er, when con­tact­ed by Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi said any de­ci­sion on seek­ing an ex­ten­sion of the SoE from Par­lia­ment will be made and an­nounced by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly, we are all acute­ly pay­ing at­ten­tion to the Delta vari­ant…those are mat­ters that the Prime Min­is­ter will con­sid­er when the Cab­i­net is hav­ing those dis­cus­sions but the mat­ter of any ex­ten­sion is square­ly a mat­ter for the Prime Min­is­ter,” the AG said.

Al-Rawi said he is ready for any call that the Prime Min­is­ter makes and he is pre­pared with mul­ti­ple op­tions, but he be­lieves the SoE has worked “in the par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances.”

Dr Ba­hall con­curs, but he be­lieves the 9 pm-5 am cur­few has run its course.

“I be­lieve that should be abol­ished al­to­geth­er. How­ev­er, our pop­u­la­tion tends to not have so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty but keep­ing the cur­few be­tween 9 am and 5 pm could be worse, so we should al­low peo­ple through ed­u­ca­tion to ad­here to the pub­lic health guide­lines.”

Dr Ba­hall said the cur­few may now en­cour­age gath­er­ings, giv­en that sev­er­al sec­tors have been re­opened by the Gov­ern­ment.

“A lot of peo­ple will be out there wait­ing to come home and there will be a dif­fer­ent set of is­sues be­tween 6 pm to 9 pm try­ing to get home in the traf­fic that will en­cour­age clus­ter­ing.”

Dr Ba­hall said there is al­so a psy­cho­log­i­cal im­pact on peo­ple who are try­ing to beat the clock to en­sure they don’t run afoul of the law.

“Re­mem­ber, we are all not crim­i­nals, we just hap­pen to be on the road be­cause of a flat tyre or a traf­fic jam, so we should just abol­ish that cur­few and al­low peo­ple to re­lax. In fact, what could be more help­ful is for busi­ness places to close at a rea­son­able time and al­low peo­ple to get their stuff to­geth­er and get home as ear­ly as pos­si­ble in­stead of mak­ing it a le­gal thing.”

On June 28 dur­ing a Min­istry of Health me­dia brief­ing, epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds said de­spite SoE mea­sures, there was still a “sig­nif­i­cant amount of move­ment in the pop­u­la­tion.”

Yes­ter­day, Ba­hall said that was to be an­tic­i­pat­ed.

“The night­time cur­few didn’t make any big dif­fer­ence be­cause peo­ple tend to not move at night un­less you go to par­ties.”

Mean­while, vi­rol­o­gist Dr Nicole Ram­lachan said the Gov­ern­ment must be cau­tious when re­mov­ing re­stric­tions, as oth­er coun­tries have seen a spike in COVID-19 cas­es af­ter mea­sures were re­laxed. She al­so be­lieves the SoE had a pos­i­tive im­pact in sup­press­ing the spread of the dis­ease but said it would be fool­hardy to ex­pect a dras­tic de­crease from that alone.

“You have to put every­thing to­geth­er. An SoE with­out vac­ci­na­tions is not go­ing to work to bring down num­bers. An SoE with­out iso­la­tion and lock­downs is not go­ing to bring down the num­bers. So what that shows to me is that it is re­al­ly a mat­ter of get­ting the vac­ci­na­tion rate up.”