Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley
Technological issues prevented the Government from rolling out the electronic monitoring bracelets to monitor persons quarantining in this country, but the Administration is now moving full steam ahead with its plan to utilise such devices.
Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley spoke to this on Monday night while fielding calls from the public, following an update from the COVID-19 Cabinet Sub-Committee on the state of the pandemic in this country. Her comments came as she said she is confident that the bracelets will be instrumental in deterring persons from seeking to break quarantine.
“...Regrettably, because of the dedicated testing and interface between Google and Apple, it took far longer for us to deploy the electronic bracelets that we have in hand than we would have liked. When you see the bracelets, you see inside them there are some wires and therefore unlike the cloth ones that people have been using thus far, if you cut that electronic bracelet, an alarm will immediately go off that will allow persons to be able to find you,” she stated.
The country’s leader explained that with the electronic bracelets, which has GPS tracking technology built in, from the time an effort is made to tamper with it, an alarm will sound, and a rapid unit will be deployed to find any such person.
“I believe that from as early as tomorrow [Tuesday] those electronic bracelets will be deployed in order to help monitor the movement of persons. That would be a significant improvement in our capacity to ensure that people don’t play the fool with respect to following the protocols,” PM Mottley said.
Meanwhile, she said that to date, some 10 individuals have been charged for breach of quarantine. Breaking down the figures, she said four of those persons are Caribbean nationals, including Barbadians, and the remaining six are from outside of the region.
“I want to put it in context, the truth is we’ve had over 15,000 persons from Britain here alone.
I don’t have the numbers for Canada and the US, but we have had thousands of persons come in, we’ve had 10 breaches of protocol. There are 10 too many breaches of protocol. I’ve spoken earlier about the extent to which persons who are our guests, while we will treat them with respect, they must equally treat our laws, our mores, our customs, our directives [and] our people with respect as well,” the Prime Minister said. (JRT)