Dr Warren Blake — president of the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association (JAAA), the governing body for track and field athletics in the country — has lashed out against the manner in which the 2020 edition of the GraceKennedy/ISSA Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships was cancelled.

Blake, who is also a veteran medical practitioner with over 40 years of service, said the decision to cancel the March 24-28 track and field carnival due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) threat was made due more to economics than the greater good of public health and safety.

He also lambasted the exclusion of the JAAA in the decision-making process, even as it was widely reported that all the stakeholders were included.

On Wednesday the decision to call off the event was announced after a series of meetings among top-level officials of organisers Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA), the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health and Wellness, and title sponsor GraceKennedy.

“Unfortunately, the decision to cancel Champs is more of an economic one rather than one taking in to account any other stakeholder position, and this is why all stakeholders should have been consulted before such a far-reaching decision was taken,” Blake said.

The JAAA, Blake claimed, was never consulted, and he thought that to be an act of disrespect.

“To make a decision like this without even the parent body of the sport being involved is really a travesty and disrespect to the governing federation, if you say you are going to have all stakeholders present,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

Additionally, Blake, who made suggestions as to how the world’s largest high school track and field championships could be held without compromising public health safety, also accused the government of putting economics ahead of pubic safety with the refusal to put travel advisories against people coming from the United Kingdom and the United States.

In an interview with the Observer on Sunday, Blake had suggested that in the case of the coronavirus reaching Jamaica, a viable option for the organisers of Champs would have been to hold the event without spectators, especially given the possibility of spectators coming from areas of the Diaspora that have high instances of the virus.

“Yesterday [Wednesday] an announcement was made that the stakeholders met and a decision was made to cancel Champs, and it was also stated that the holding of Champs without spectators was never on the cards.

“Over the weekend, when I was interviewed about what would happen to Champs if the coronavirus came to Jamaica, I clearly stated that a viable option was to hold Champs in the absence of spectators, the reason for this being that a lot of the spectators, especially those in the Grandstand, would come from North America and the Diaspora and areas of the Diaspora that have unknown numbers of coronavirus cases — in New York and Florida. Also, people who would come from the UK could have been exposed as well, so to put 35,000 people in the stands would run the risk of creating a serious public health outbreak,” Blake reasoned.

The JAAA boss further stated that even without the expected 15,000 spectators on Friday and 35,000 expected on Saturday’s final day, there would be athletes still to account for, but said there were several precautions that could be observed.

“People have said if you remove the spectators you still would have almost 3,000 athletes to contend with and that would be a risk, but one of the precautions of not transmitting coronavirus between individuals is social distances — and at no time during Champs over the five days would you have 3,000 athletes in the stadium at any one time,” Blake said.

With several venues in close proximity to National Stadium, Dr Blake said arrangements could be made, “given that we have sufficient time to host the athletes who are going to compete on any given day in different locations”.

“There are at least five different locations in Kingston that could easily host the athletes for their warm-up and preparations before competition,” he said, naming Calabar High School, Jamaica College and Kingston College, with all three having all-weather tracks.

Excelsior High School and The Mico University College are also viable options.

“Those locations could easily be used as warm-up areas, where athletes could safely warm up and they could be transported to the stadium in time for their call-room activities, so at no time there would be masses of athletes congregated together at the stadium at any one time,” Blake stated.

Fans, he said, would have to be content with following the action through the various media outlets.

Blake said he was expecting backlash for his position from persons concerned about public safety, but said his experience as a medical doctor as well as his efforts to keep up with news on the outbreak puts him in a position from which to make qualified statements.

“I have 44 years of medical experience and, finding myself as the president of a national federation in a coronavirus outbreak, one of the first things I have done is to read everything that has been written and listened to everything that has been said about the coronavirus outbreak, and I am certainly as aware as any medical practitioner anywhere about the vagaries of the coronavirus,” he noted.

Blake chided what he said was misinformation coming from the Government about the virus. “I have heard our leaders give misinformation about coronavirus in the media. In a press briefing I have heard the honourable minister state that coronavirus is not transmitted until you start coughing and sneezing and this was also repeated by the chief medical officer in the same press briefing. This is clearly not so, nobody believes that,” he charged.

The JAAA head said: “Part of the difficulty with the coronavirus outbreak is that it is clear to a lot of researchers that there is a high possibility that transmission between individuals can take place before you start showing symptoms, and this is part of the reasons for not wanting to have crowds of spectators in the stadium.”

He also took on the Government’s decision not to put out travel restrictions on the United Kingdom and the United States.

“When you look at the situation with travel restrictions, we instituted travel restrictions against five countries, including China and Italy, at a time when the death count was very low in these countries.

“We added three more in France, Spain and Germany and we did not add the country that sent the two cases to us, knowing full well at the time there was another strongly suspicious case coming from the same country, the United Kingdom.

“There is an outbreak of uncertain deaths in the US, with death tolls and death rates greater than anywhere else in the world, and we have not considered adding the USA to the list of travel restrictions and we are told the reason for this is economics and the economic fallouts. Clearly economics is trumping public health and we are saying it has not reached the criteria for travel restrictions. We are either serious about travel restrictions or we are not, and we should not pretend otherwise,” said Blake in his reprimand of the Government’s handling of the situation so far.