KINGSTON, Jamaica – The Ministry of Health and Wellness will tomorrow (May 5) continue contact tracing to determine if they have identified all persons who may have had contact with a COVID-19-positive employee of another business process outsourcing (BPO) firm operating in Portmore, St Catherine.

“So far, we have identified 34 close contacts of this worker. We have tested those and they are all negative,” Chief Medical Officer (CMO) in the MOHW Dr Jacquiline Bisasor-McKenzie said during this evening’s virtual post-Cabinet press briefing.

“We go on to another round of testing tomorrow morning to ensure that we are not missing any persons within that group,” the CMO said.

BPOs, which are being closely monitored by a special task force, have been under intense scrutiny since Alorica emerged as the epicentre of a cluster that makes up more than 60 per cent of the country’s total number of cases.

During the briefing, Prime Minister Andrew Holness repeated earlier comments about the importance of the sector, which employs roughly 40,000 Jamaicans.

“It is the third largest employer in the country and the third largest [earner of] foreign exchange for us,” he said. “So this is not an industry which we can see destroyed.”

He stressed that the outbreak in the BPO sector could have happened in other industries that operate in close-contact environments.

Once the pandemic is over, Holness said, the measures being put in place to combat the spread of COVID-19 would make Jamaica’s standards higher than the ones in place for the industry globally. “The crisis… provides us with an opportunity to make the industry more robust, to make it stronger and, who knows, maybe to even expand the industry,” he added.

CNC