Barbados today – The move is a bid for stricter surveillance to ensure those in home quarantine arrangements do not risk spreading COVID-19 in the community.
People are placed on quarantine and monitored by health care providers while they are awaiting COVID-19 test results in case they develop symptoms before the results return and need to receive medical care at an isolation centre.
Health authorities are awaiting the arrival of bracelets which people on home quarantine will be required to wear so that their whereabouts can be monitored at all times, Lt Col Bostic told a Barbados Labour Party (BLP) St Philip South branch meeting on Sunday.
He said: “We would have had them by now but we told them we want waterproof bracelets because you can’t say that you are in the sea or you in the bath. You keep it on and if you take it off we will know that you have taken it off.
“And then if you are on home quarantine, and we have had to do this before, and you decide that you are going to play the fool, well we are going to pick you up and we will carry you straight to Paragon. If we can’t get you one way, then we will get you the next.”
The Health Minister noted that the 60 constituency health officers have been helpful in identifying a case where an individual placed on quarantine did not leave his premises but was caught receiving visitors.
“And if people start to integrate, I mean visitors into the society, we are going to start to do some random testing in hotels, some random testing in attraction sites as soon as people start to come back in that sort of way.”