Anguilla’s Premier and Minister of Finance and Health, Dr. Ellis Lorenzo Webster, has perhaps given his most informative decision to date regarding how the Government intends to fully reopen Anguilla with the looming threat of the COVID-19 virus. He gave his, and the Government’s, perspective on Wednesday, July 14, in a Radio Anguilla interview with Keith ‘Stone’ Greaves.
“Right now, here in Anguilla, masks are mandatory in public spaces where there can’t be social distancing,” he started off. “That will continue because I feel that it is necessary until we get to a vaccination level of 70% of the population. I think that we are vulnerable, even at that point, but at least there is a better chance that, with the epidemiology and scientific [knowledge available], we can stem the transmission of the virus. We do know that as long as we want to keep an economy in Anguilla we have to have visitors coming in; and there is a risk that we can import the virus – so masks will continue to be mandated in public spaces where there can’t be social distancing.”
In terms of the possibility of further considering the vaccination programme, Dr Webster continued: “We said that all options were still on the table including talking about mandatory vaccination for those who are exposed to the public. There is no way that we can get around that. We haven’t imposed it because the vaccination uptake was going along – and we allowed people to have that chance, but you can see that …, when those two cases came in on July 1st, if we were not doing the testing, tracing and isolation, this could have been disastrous. We know that we had a cluster when 78 persons got sick with three ending up in the hospital with severe symptoms. So these are things that we, as a Government, have to take into consideration.
“We cannot close the country back down. You can see from the numbers that it is not sustainable.It would be detrimental to the wellbeing of the people of Anguilla to close the country again. We don’t intend to do that so we have to mitigate for that. If you think about the British Virgin Islands, right now there are over 1200 positive cases and a fifth person died today. Anguilla couldn’t sustain that. They are setting up field hospitals in the BVI. If we had 78 cases and three ended up in the hospital – double that, we would have used up all the beds we had. The hospital would have had to close down because we would have been just treating COVID patients.”
Speaking further about the need for 70 % of the population of Anguilla to be vaccinated, beyond the 60% or thereabout, the Premier stated: “I get a little bit upset sometimes when I hear persons – especially teachers – who say they are not going to vaccinate. And they know that the children can’t be vaccinated because the vaccine is not cleared for them… I think that is irresponsible, unpatriotic…At some point, if we don’t get to the 70%, we will have to start putting in place certain policies…We already have that work permit holders – new ones and those renewing – to be vaccinated unless there is a medical exemption, of course.
“These are some of the things we are doing but nothing is off the table. We are not going to round-up people and force them to be vaccinated but, certainly, it has to be where we get to the point where we can open up this country; where we can say to the ferryboat operators that they can run back and forth to Marigot without us worrying that they are going to bring in somebody with the virus who will then spread it through the country. We have to make those decisions. The people have put us here to make the tough decisions and we are going to do it.”
Dr. Webster spoke about one visitor, in particular, who arrived in Anguilla on July 1st, and tested positive for the Delta virus. “That is scary because we know it can happen. You can have persons test negative before they come; test negative on arrival; and then be positive because the test didn’t pick it up. This is what we are concerned about.
“If we had 70% of our population adequately vaccinated, we wouldn’t be as concerned because those who are vaccinated would be protecting those who can’t [or have not]. Even though we now know that the vaccines were not as efficacious against the Delta variant, AstraZeneca is still providing that type of coverage – all of them provide coverage even though the Delta variant is a hard one; and we know that it has an increased chance of transmission and an increased chance of persons getting sick.”
With respect to the Government of Anguilla looking into the possibility of obtaining the Pfizer vaccine for children, Premier Webster stated: “We have been asking the UK to provide the vaccine. One of the concerns is the cold chain. Pfizer has to be kept at minus 70 degrees. We don’t have direct flights from London to Anguilla like Antigua, Cayman, Turks and Caicos and Bermuda do, so they got Pfizer from the UK. We are hoping that we can work out a plan where we can get Pfizer so that we can vaccinate the 12-17 year-olds, and some of the young people who have been hesitant about AstraZeneca. At this point in time we are hoping that if we get the Pfizer that they [the UK Government] would cover the cost but, if it becomes necessary for us to pay for it [we will do so].
“There was a time when we signed up with the COVAK facility – and that was very expensive. I think it was going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars that Anguilla would have had to pay to procure that. So we were happy that the UK Government decided that they would commit to providing the vaccines that we needed.”
The Premier added: “That money Anguilla might pay would have to come from somewhere. So we would have to cut some of the service to provide it. We certainly would do so.”
