Time for action

Testing for COVID-19 remains low, so data on new infections and deaths do not reflect the real movement of the disease around the country.

The PLP Action Plan on COVID-19, as early as October 2020, called for free and expanded testing. This was re-emphasized in its recent campaign before coming to office.

So far, a free rapid antigen test pilot program was launched in Inagua, after the island experienced increased infections and alarming deaths a month ago. The pilot program then moved to North Eleuthera on October 27 and to the Berry Islands on October 29.

No evaluation of the pilot programs has been announced and as these were pilot programs only, it is not known whether residents on those islands will be able to continue to avail themselves of additional free rapid antigen tests in the weeks and months ahead. More importantly, the government has been silent on any plans to make the more accurate PCR tests available free of charge anywhere.

A pilot program in three sparsely populated areas does not amount to the fulfillment of a campaign promise to dramatically increase testing, so as to better formulate policies to fight COVID-19.

Thousands of residents on New Providence and Grand Bahama take little satisfaction from pilot programs, which, so far, appear to be the only anti-COVID initiative of the Davis administration.

Further, the vaccination uptake in the country remains low. According to data coming from the Ministry of Health, roughly 35 percent of The Bahamas’ population has been vaccinated.

International tracking of our daily rate of vaccinations, approximately 765, indicates that unless there is a major uptake in vaccinations, it will take us another 102 days to vaccinate another 10 percent of our population. That would take us to the end of February, two weeks shy of the second anniversary of the first detection of the disease in the country.

This would be a long way from herd immunity. Indeed, it is far from the 200,000 people, or 50 percent of the population, that health officials hoped to have vaccinated by the end of the year.

It is still early days in the new government’s term in office, but the government should understand that ending offending emergency powers is not in and of itself a policy.

Gender equality and domestic violence

Twenty years ago, segments of the political opposition in the country first convinced the majority of Bahamian voters that the country was not ready for equality of the sexes in the constitution. The idea they claimed was complex and ordinary people could not understand the concept.

Efforts in 2009 to amend the Domestic Violence Act, which would criminalize marital rape, fared a similar fate when politicians bowed to pressure from fundamentalist religious leaders in the Christian Council to keep amending legislation from even being put to a vote in Parliament.

Then, a new attempt to amend the constitution to end discrimination against women failed again in 2016 due in part to political payback for the 2002 partisan vote against constitutional reform.

The placating of ignorance by too many in our society has brought us to the appalling and horrifying place where a woman was run over by a car allegedly driven by an irate rejected lover who then dragged her along a stretch of the road.

It is a sad reality that opposition to marital rape legislation and to gender equality are not unrelated to or disconnected from the abuse of women in our society. Equality in and under the law is a fundamental requisite of the rule of law, for it promotes and creates civil interactions among all people.

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source https://thenassauguardian.com/time-for-action/