EVEN though Minister of Health and Wellness Christopher Tufton concedes that the “US does represent a risk” in Jamaica’s efforts to protect the island’s population from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), it appears unlikely that America will be added to the restricted travel list.

“The US does represent a risk, there’s no doubt about it. We have hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans living in the US, and who travel back and forth,” he told the Jamaica Observer yesterday, less than an hour before the country’s first case of the respiratory virus was confirmed. With COVID-19 now confirmed in popular locations for Jamaicans to visit and live, the health minister suggested that it would be a good time to improve on the screening of people entering the country from those areas.

“Part of the risk assessment would also be to ensure that our own facilities at our borders are sufficiently beefed up to enhance the interrogation of those individuals who come in from the US. In the past we would have been less rigid. But now that we have the spread, particularly in certain states — for example New York [and] Florida where many Jamaicans are, and others [visit] — I think we have to improve that,” he said. In addition to being home to many Jamaicans, the US provides a huge chunk of visitors to the island and is also among its major trading partners.

Yesterday, the number of countries on Jamaica’s restricted travel list was expanded to include Germany (1,139 cases), France (1,402) and Spain (1,024).

They join China (80,924), South Korea (7,513), Singapore (160), Italy (9,172) and Iran (7,161). Singapore has the least number of cases, but according to chief medical officer in the health ministry Dr Jacqueline Bisasor-McKenzie, there are no plans to remove countries from the list at this time. The United Kingdom, which has 373 cases and is the source of Jamaica’s first imported case, is not on the list.

Minister Tufton explained yesterday that as the number of countries with confirmed cases increases, restricting travel may do more harm than good. Factors considered when deciding which countries make the list include the rate of spread, number of deaths per population size and whether the country appears to have the situation under control.

“Now that you have the virus in over 100 countries, as it spreads, and whether or not the WHO declares a further upgrade of the threat to a global pandemic, the idea of restrictions could be not as important — and indeed may be counterproductive, given the relationships with some of these countries and the extent to which other things have to happen even while we try to control the virus,” Tufton told the Observer when asked specifically about the possibility of the US being added to the list.

“And those are all part and parcel of the risk assessment. So this is why the [COVID-19 Comprehensive Response] Plan attempts to capture prevention, but also containment,”  he said, adding that there needs to be heavy emphasis on preventing imported cases from spreading within communities.