Dear Editor,

When I read last week of the decision to allow 4,000 cruise ship passengers to disembark and walk around freely in Ocho Rios, whilst not permitting others aboard the same ship to do so out of fear that they were carriers of the COVID-19 virus, I felt such a decision had to have been made in haste and would never be repeated. Unfortunately, I was wrong as the same thing happened again when a ship, which admittedly had some passengers with questionable health conditions, was permitted to dock and the majority of passengers allowed to disembark and walk about freely in Ocho Rios while others were denied that same opportunity based on the risk they were thought to present.

Have we learnt nothing from the happenings in other countries?

Have we not realised that we are dealing with a highly contagious disease that is becoming a pandemic and with a disease that kills?

The fact is that thousands of those tourists that we have permitted to land on our island are quite likely individuals who have been in close contact with those very same people on the ship who were not permitted to land out of a fear that they were themselves carrying the virus.

Seeing that the COVID-19 virus can be in someone’s body and that person can display no symptoms for many days while spreading the disease to others it is simply impossible and impractical to assess the risk of a disembarking passenger simply by the symptoms they present when stepping off the ship.

As such, one would think that either all passengers on a ship would be permitted to disembark if there were no suspected cases of this virus on-board or, conversely, no passenger at all should be allowed to set foot on our soil if even one person on that ship is feared to be a carrier of this dreaded and deadly virus.

Why has this been permitted? Have we lost our senses or was it to help the business community or to beef up the tourist arrival numbers? We have to decide, and decide quickly, whether our interest is in shoring up the tourist numbers, assisting the merchants, or seriously looking about the health and safety of our people.

While I can well understand the reluctance of the Government to turn back cruise ships and, adversely, affect our tourism numbers short term, I urge the powers that be to consider the long-term effect on our tourism product if this virus were to invade our shores as it is bound to do if the Russian roulette policy currently being employed is permitted to continue.

This craziness must stop, as action of this sort is highly irresponsible and is playing a dangerous game with the lives of every Jamaican.

Philip Azar

lpazarltd@yahoo.com