Kalain Ho­sein

In the last week, reg­u­la­tions have been chang­ing quite rapid­ly, even by COVID-19 stan­dards. Last Fri­day, the Prime Min­is­ter an­nounced a slew of changes to the COVID-19 mea­sures, lift­ing re­stric­tions across the board. On March 7th, 2022, the pub­lic ser­vice will re­turn to full ser­vice, and all pub­lic ser­vants will be ex­pect­ed to re­turn to work as nor­mal.

The mea­sure met some crit­i­cism by par­ents since schools and day­cares for the youngest of the pop­u­la­tion re­mained closed, leav­ing them scram­bling to find child­care. Then, last Sat­ur­day, the Min­is­ter of Health, Ter­rance Deyals­ingh, said that it was still too risky to open day­cares at their me­dia con­fer­ence. “We are still con­cerned about young chil­dren and tod­dlers who are un­vac­ci­nat­ed. The risk is still too high at this point in time to both the chil­dren and their par­ents. I em­pathise with the peo­ple who have been se­vere­ly af­fect­ed by this. None of these sec­tors asked for this.”

But no more than 24 hours lat­er, the Health Min­istry sent a late-night me­dia re­lease at 11:27 PM, in­di­cat­ing that day­cares can re­open from March 7th, 2022. For of­fi­cials that have tout­ed fol­low­ing the sci­ence for much of the pan­dem­ic, this flip-flop was mind­bog­gling for some, but it was a wide­ly wel­comed de­ci­sion.

At Wednes­day’s Min­istry of Health me­dia con­fer­ence, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rance Deyals­ingh ex­plained, “The rea­son that we re­vis­it­ed the pro­pos­al on day­cares was we got a lot of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, es­pe­cial­ly from pub­lic ser­vants who had to come out on Mon­day.”

He al­so said, “we look at these mea­sures all the time […] weigh­ing the risk and ben­e­fit of get­ting peo­ple back out to work, be­ing pro­duc­tive. That was the rea­son why we re­vis­it­ed the idea be­tween Sat­ur­day and Sun­day to ac­com­mo­date main­ly pub­lic ser­vants and teach­ers to some ex­tent and all those com­ing back out to work. It is a risk.”

The Min­is­ter al­so cau­tioned, “We can’t co­coon […] the pop­u­la­tion much longer. In tak­ing this risk, the per­son­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of this is go­ing to be­come cru­cial.” Deyals­ingh ex­plained that fam­i­lies uti­liz­ing child­care op­tions should have any fam­i­ly mem­bers above 12 ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed to give some lev­els of pro­tec­tion to their un­vac­ci­nat­ed chil­dren. In ad­di­tion, if you no­tice your child dis­play­ing flu-like symp­toms, do not bring the child to day­care and keep the child at home. Deyals­ingh al­so added that day­cares too have an added re­spon­si­bil­i­ty by not ac­cept­ing chil­dren with any kind of flu-like symp­toms or fevers.

Jus­ti­fy­ing the de­ci­sion-mak­ing process, the Health Min­is­ter said, “The de­ci­sion-mak­ing has changed dras­ti­cal­ly in the past few months as op­posed to the first 18, 19, 20 months of the pan­dem­ic.” These changes stem from hav­ing more than 50 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed and hav­ing a low­er hos­pi­tal­iza­tion rate.

“De­ci­sion-mak­ing has to change as the pan­dem­ic evolves. We al­ways said once the mass vac­ci­na­tion process start­ed in May and June, the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty now has been shift­ed from the gov­ern­ment –  gov­ern­ment ac­tions like lock­downs, clos­ing to per­son­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to ei­ther get vac­ci­nat­ed or fol­low the pub­lic health reg­u­la­tions,” Deyals­ingh said.

The Health Min­is­ter cau­tioned, “that’s why we can take these brave de­ci­sions be­cause we have to get every­one back out to work but as safe­ly as pos­si­ble but know­ing we are tak­ing some risk. It is the on­ly way to man­age this phase of the pan­dem­ic. If we don’t do that and re­ly on lock­downs, we are go­ing to have a so­cioe­co­nom­ic fall­out where peo­ple are not work­ing, not gen­er­at­ing in­come with taxis not work­ing, and you don’t want that to be pro­longed.”