While there was no eas­ing of re­stric­tions Sat­ur­day as it per­tains to so­cial gath­er­ings or the re­sump­tion of con­tact sports, a de­ci­sion was tak­en to al­low gro­ceries/su­per­mar­kets/goods re­tail­ers to open for a 24-hour pe­ri­od be­gin­ning from De­cem­ber 10 to Jan­u­ary 3.

An­nounc­ing this dur­ing Sat­ur­day’s me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said it was aimed at “spread­ing out” the num­bers of cit­i­zens seek­ing to stock up on gro­ceries and oth­er es­sen­tial items dur­ing this hol­i­day pe­ri­od.

He ex­plained it was in keep­ing with plans to re­duce the large num­bers of peo­ple rush­ing to pur­chase gro­ceries and re­duce the num­bers gath­er­ing in pub­lic.

Look­ing ahead to Jan­u­ary 2021, Row­ley said there would be a vir­tu­al re­sump­tion of schools on Jan­u­ary 4.

Fol­low­ing dis­cus­sions with Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly and Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, Row­ley said they al­so de­cid­ed to al­low 15,000 sec­ondary school stu­dents, who have reg­is­tered to write the Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil (CXC) Jan­u­ary ex­ams to do so as planned. The ex­ams are sched­uled to take place be­tween Jan­u­ary 17 and Feb­ru­ary 4.

Row­ley said, “We will al­low those ex­ams to take place.” But added, “That is de­pen­dent on the good re­sult for good be­hav­iour by the pop­u­la­tion over Christ­mas.”

Once the num­bers hold firm, Row­ley said they would al­low Stan­dard Five pupils to re­turn to pri­ma­ry schools on Feb­ru­ary 8, whilst sec­ondary school stu­dents in Forms Four to Six would al­so be al­lowed to re­turn.

He de­scribed it as a test­ing of the wa­ters dur­ing which the stu­dents would be re­quired to wear masks. along with in­ten­sive san­i­tiz­ing process­es which will be car­ried out by school au­thor­i­ties.

Fur­ther to this, he said the ed­u­ca­tion min­istry has been tasked with set­ting up a rov­ing health and safe­ty team com­pris­ing doc­tor and sev­er­al nurs­es, which will vis­it schools and en­sure pro­to­cols are be­ing en­forced.

Govt will do what it has to do to pro­tect cit­i­zens

Asked to say if the Gov­ern­ment could con­tin­ue to sat­is­fy its fi­nan­cial com­mit­ments to pub­lic ser­vants in the com­ing months, giv­en the eco­nom­ic con­trac­tion and the mis­cel­la­neous fac­tors af­fect­ing rev­enue streams, Row­ley said they have been able to main­tain sev­er­al sec­tors and de­vel­op­men­tal pro­grammes through bor­row­ing, as it was im­per­a­tive to cre­ate jobs and stim­u­late the lo­cal econ­o­my in turn.

He said while it was un­cer­tain as to how long they could con­tin­ue do­ing this, the Gov­ern­ment would do what it had to do to pro­tect and main­tain its cit­i­zens.