Last week’s public announcements regarding procedures for public access to government offices and the requirement that unvaccinated minibus drivers not provide a public transport service unless they acquire the Covid-19 vaccine must, it seems, be taken as an indication that the authorities are seeking to employ every measure short of overall compulsoriness to ensure that the country is fully vaccinated against the Covid-19 pandemic.
The move was slow in coming and now that it has it is likely to encounter some measure of pushback from those sections of the population that had formed its own conclusion about the pandemic including their perspectives on the recommended precautions and prescriptions.
One might add that public concerns, such as they exist should not be dismissed out of hand. Some of them are very real and insofar as we are aware no particularly strenuous official measures have been taken to address those.
Recall that the pandemic visited us almost simultaneously with the March 2020 elections imbroglio so that, at the outset, the urgency of the malady had to compete with the prevailing political climate for public attention. Setting that aside, there has been as well, from the inception, considerable numbers of skeptics who had set their faces against the earlier prescribed Covid-19 precautions, seemingly for no good reason.
Beyond that, even with the in-school education system eventually shut down as a precaution we continued to set what we felt were reasonable deadlines for the crisis to pass. Those deadlines are now proven to have been fashioned out of hope rather than certainty.
Once the elections imbroglio had passed the country was left with an incomplete Covid-19 Hospital at Liliendaal and a newly installed administration that was required to hit the ground running insofar as responding to the pandemic was concerned.
A great deal of indecision followed. The official response did not seem, at the earliest stage, to match the sheer scale of the emergency. It will be recalled, further, that such strictures as had earlier been put in place had been responded to with much public pushback. Not only did the authorities, not least the Guyana Police Force, appear at times to be like deer caught in the glare of headlamps in response to the wholesale transgression of the curfew-related protocols, but the government itself managed to get itself cited for what was felt to be its failure to frown on some places of entertainment that were completely ignoring the attendant protocols. Nor, some complained, did the government seem unduly perturbed over the Private Sector Commission’s tirade against a state agency assigned to oversee compliance with the strictures after it had reprimanded a popular Georgetown place of entertainment.
If the government had only itself to blame for what, at one point, seemed to be a decided leaden-footedness in its response to a vigorous public pushback against any form of official reining in, arguably one of its more pointed errors was its failure to use President Irfaan Ali’s justified outburst against the absence of mask-wearing and social-distancing at a cricket match to which he had been invited, as a starting point for a more robust campaign against reckless behaviour. Indeed, there has been, neither before nor after, any more fitting opportunity for the President to place himself at the head of the national charge for a significantly stepped up pursuit of enhanced compliance with the strictures associated with responding as best we could to the pandemic.
Enter the Covid-19 vaccination and more glitches occurred. Again, some measure of public resistance against the vaccination ought to have been anticipated. Even before its appearance, some of the far-fetched tales that had come to be attached to the virus appeared to ‘rub off’ on the vaccination. Unsubstantiated tall tales about ‘side effects’ met with little response. This meant that some of them took root and, it would appear, spread much more widely than one might have thought they would.
Of late, it would seem that the authorities, having been unable to ‘turn up’ what might be considered to be a significant number of vaccinated Guyanese have decided to up the ante. They have done so, seemingly, because there is more than sufficient evidence that Covid-19 remains alive and kicking and that contrary to what we may have thought a year or so ago, we may well be in for a longer haul than many of us might have anticipated.
The government, it seems, has decided that, at this stage, it must adopt the most potent attention-getting measures that it can. As of earlier this week non-Covid-19 ‘passport’ holders are required to satisfy certain procedures before they can be allowed into government offices and unvaccinated minibus drivers must get vaccinated or stand down. These are considerable restrictions and one assumes that government is prepared to buttress these with corresponding ‘policing’ measures.
There is, one might add, every likelihood that, to a greater or lesser extent, these new strictures will also may be met with some measure of public resistance. That is why, the tough measures must be cushioned by ‘softer’ ones. In recent weeks there had been evidence of new arrangements designed to make access to vaccinations much easier. Those must continue. There must, as well, be a stepping up of official assurances not only with regard to the importance of being vaccinated but also with regard to the safety of the vaccinations. There is no denying that one of the concerns that has been expressed about the vaccinations has to do with the different types that are being administered. Assurances about the efficacy of each of these could help to assuage existing pockets of apprehension.
There are other hills to climb here. One suspects that the recent moves by government to ‘up’ the numbers of vaccinated Guyanese by resorting to the recent, more assertive measures to have people ‘take their jabs’ is, as much as anything else, a signal to the private sector that similar, measured action on its part will not be officially frowned upon. Such measures, will have altogether different implications for the private sector and for the populace as a whole. But then one gets an acute sense that the world is seeking to double down on the Covid-19 pandemic and that there is no neutral corner in which we can situate ourselves.
