The country will likely hear at Monday evening’s Jamaica House press conference that the seven-day lockdown in St Catherine – due to be lifted at 5 am Wednesday – will be extended by at least another seven days.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness has repeatedly hinted that the lockdown for the country’s second largest parish will be extended since he made the announcement of the measure last Tuesday.
However, he gave his clearest indication yet that it will be extended when he toured Portmore and Spanish Town on Saturday to get a firsthand view of the chaos that unfolded as parishioners scrambled to stock up on supplies on one of two shopping days allowed under the lockdown. The other restocking day is Wednesday.
The lockdown for St Catherine followed a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases on the island. That number stood at a frightening 196 cases as of Sunday night with 95 of them linked to the Portmore-based call centre company, Alorica. Healthcare workers are currently tracing 686 contacts across the island with 179 of them linked to the workplace cluster.
There are growing concerns that community spread is already underway in St Catherine and the worry is heightened in the municipality of Portmore where the now shuttered call centre is located and where many of its workers live.
The large crowds that formed for hours outside supermarkets, wholesales, pharmacies and water refilling establishments on Saturday added to concerns that such an environment was ripe for spreading the highly contagious coronavirus. The government has since hinted that it will extend shopping hours as was suggested in parliament last Wednesday by South St Catherine Member of Parliament, Fitz Jackson.
But speculation has been rife that other parts of the country could be placed under lockdown as well and at least one member of the Opposition People’s National Party has suggested that the entire country should be shut down for at least three weeks to limit the spread of the virus. Some business leaders appear supportive of this move but others are concerned that such an undertaking would devastate the economy with tens of thousands of Jamaicans already out of work. The call centre business provides employment for some 40,000 Jamaicans and its operations in St Catherine have been shuttered.
During his tour of the parish Saturday evening, Holness said: “I think the people will understand that the Government is listening to get the feedback, and we try to create the orders, given the peculiarities of our society. A significant percentage of Jamaicans live from day to day. So they earn today and they spend today, and they don’t have enough savings to convert that to stocks of food supplies that they can keep in their house,” he said.
Holness acknowledged that such persons “…Have to literally buy at the lowest block of retail, so that creates its own idiosyncratic developments for us, so we have to manage that part of it very carefully. And whatever we do in putting in these control measures we have to be sensitive to the needs of the people”.
“Most people understand that there is an epidemic, they understand why we have to put the measures in. Their concern is, ‘Am I going to go home hungry?’, and that has to be addressed,” said Holness.
He again indicated that the lockdown will be extended when he said: “So we might give them more time to shop, and that might mean an additional day”.
He acknowledged that the crowds in the municipality and in Spanish Town were big because “Normally you would have had persons leaving Portmore to shop in Kingston, or would have shopped already in Kingston, in addition to persons taking precautions to stock up, so there was a greater than normal demand today [Saturday] and Wednesday”.
“We expect this to moderate as the measure is extended and people have adjusted,” he added.
Meanwhile, persons who rely on their daily hustle or relatives overseas to put food on the table are concerned that their nutritional needs will not be met.
A single mother of three who lives in Independence City in Portmore had shuttered her cook shop weeks ago when sales dried up. She is getting close to desperate.
“So far mi still get a likkle money from mi relatives in the United States but they keep telling me that they losing hours at work so the amount that they can send will keeping getting smaller or it might soon stop all together,” *Sandra James told Loop News on the weekend.
“I rely on my children’s father who is overseas for support but he is sending less money now because the restaurant where he works has been closed but he still gets part of his salary,” another Portmore resident told our news centre.
One man who resides in Passage Fort and who supplies goods to wholesale establishments said his business had fallen off 50 per cent before the lockdown. And some shoppers on the weekend, especially those who were allowed to shop last, said the variety of goods was limited.
