By mid-January, all public servants and employees at state agencies, including national security, will be required to be vaccinated to go to work or they can choose to stay home without pay.
This was just one of the major announcements made by the Prime Minister on Saturday during a press conference at the Diplomatic Centre, St Ann's.
He also announced beaches will be reopened from Monday between 5 am and 12 pm, but there is to be no alcoholic beverages, no loud music or partying, no congregating, and masks must be work when out of the water. Rivers and waterfalls are still closed to the public.
And from December 24 to January 2, the public service, except essential services, will be shut down to mitigate the spread of the covid19 virus and allow people to get vaccinated.
'This is not an invitation to go out there and congregate. 'Long time I ain't see you.' This is an invitation to stay at home, stay close in whatever bubble you would have created. Try and protect yourself from unnecessary exposure. If we do that nationwide, we anticipate that could have an effect of a breaking of the infection tsunami,' said Dr Rowley.
Chief Medical Officer Dr Roshan Parasram added that a mass storage site for the bodies of people who died of covid19 would be established in Freeport in collaboration with the Funeral Homes Association.
Minister of Energy and Energy Industries and Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister, Stuart Young, also indicated that government is going ahead with digitising vaccination certification with the use of QR codes for use in safe zones.
All this as Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh reported two more cases of omicron, and that the ministry was diverting resources from non-covid19, non-critical areas to the parallel health care system. He said with most of the severely ill being unvaccinated, they were impacting the services of the regular health care system so the ministry was shutting down outpatient clinics to allow for the changes in human resources.
Rowley stressed that, because of the increasing number of new cases, hospitalisations and deaths, as well as the low vaccination numbers, the government had to intervene to encourage people to get vaccinated and increase the country's vaccination rate which has lingered in the mid-forties for weeks.
He repeatedly said he took the oath of office to 'act without fear or favour, without malice or ill will' so he made the decision to 'take action' and 'create safe zones' in the public sector.
'(The covid19 projections) requires intervention. That intervention could be shut down the economy. We've taken the position that we're not going to do that, because if we do that we will create circumstances that would be almost as unpleasant as the circumstances of the growth of that infection level.'
He said it is possible in some sectors for the majority of employees to protect themselves and the rest of the country against the virus by being vaccinated. He called the government the 'biggest delinquent' as that has not been the
