BASSETERRE, St. Kitts - THE announcement of case number 46 in St. Kitts and Nevis and the alarm that was raised for possible community spread of the Coronavirus has forced the Police Force to cancel more than 100 parties and fetes for the holiday weekend.
Citizens and residents will be having a three-day weekend, from this Saturday through Monday, and a number of fetes were scheduled for that period.
But with the latest development, the police were forced to pull the plug as medical officials are now conducting deep contact tracing efforts to locate those persons with whom case number 46 were in close contact and also to mitigate any fallout from the virus.
Speaking on the “Policing with You” programme, Superintendent Cromwell Henry acknowledged that they were forced to do so out of an abundance of caution.
He said the cancellations were due to the fact that many of the events are social gatherings that bring a large number of people together in a formal setting.
“Just the very nature that people come together, people socialise, people not thinking about the disease and thinking about leaving their stress, talking about their problem, having fun laughing...these are the things that promote the spread of the virus. And so the medical professionals have advised that the further apart that we keep people...the better it is,” Henry explained.
He added: “We had well over 100 events that were already in the system, and most of them would have been approved. All of them would have been with over 25 persons.”
Addressing suggestions of the Police Force being malicious as it granted approval for parties on Tuesday and cancelled them a day later,knowing that there was a COVID-19 case, Superintendent Henry said they were only made aware of the development at a meeting last evening (May 19) prior to the briefing.
He explained that there was no knowledge of the situation on Tuesday when approvals were granted, as the emergency meeting was 4:00 p.m. after the results were obtained.
“So, any events that were approved on Tuesday, it was without knowledge of what would have happened on Wednesday. So, we would not have knowingly given permission to host an event on one day knowing that it would be taken back the following day,” added Henry.
