“Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday”.– Dale Carnegie

For many people across the world the scenes of sandy beaches , palm trees and pastel shades of buildings conjure up the typical exotic holiday. The Caribbean ticks all these boxes but for a region that depends so much on tourism the pandemic has had a devastating effect on their economies and for many of the countries in this region it will take years for them to recover.

The Carribean is made up of 20 different countries and in 2020 their economy saw a drop of 8.6% compared to the previous year, due to the pandemic. Figures for 2021 will be similar unless the tourists return.

In this report I will look at a few of these islands that make up the Caribbean and try to give an overview of how the region has been affected.

It had looked as if Barbados might avoid a destructive Covid-19 pandemic. The Caribbean nation, home to around 287000 people, registered fewer than 400 cases of the disease for the whole of 2020. But January 2021 saw a surge. By the end of the month, Barbados had registered well over 1000 new cases of Covid-19. On February 3, 2021, it went into lockdown.

On the same day, Saint Lucia declared a State of Emergency. It has confirmed more than three times as many cases of Covid-19 this year as it did last year. Like Barbados, Saint Lucia has imposed a nightly curfew on its 180 000 or so residents. Community transmission of Covid-19 has also been established in other parts of the Caribbean, including Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. “We are seeing more clusters of transmission and some places are no longer able to trace all the new cases that are emerging”, notes Joy St John, Executive Director of the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA). CARPHA has helped co-ordinate the response to Covid-19 across the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), a regional body that brings together 20 countries and overseas territories, most of which are island states.

The membership is mostly English Speaking (Haiti and Suriname are notable exceptions). The Spanish speaking parts of the Caribbean are culturally and politically distinct. Neither Cuba, which has experienced a sharp rise in Covid-19 cases this year, nor the Dominica Republic, which has consistently struggled to contain the disease, are members of CARICOM. Covid-19 was not detected in the region until March, 2020. “The CARICOM Caribbean perhaps benefited somewhat from the lag between the outbreak taking off in Europe and the first cases arriving in the Caribbean”, explains Ian Hambleton (Professor of Biostatistics at The George Alleyne Chronic Disease Research Centre).

According to an analysis co-authored by Hambleton, Caribbean nations began controlling movement into the country an average of 27 days before their first confirmed case of Covid-19. From April–June 2020, the CARICOM countries largely closed their borders. The majority imposed strict restrictions on internal movement. Those who broke curfew in Barbados were liable for hefty fines. The country saw sharp reductions in population mobility. By June, 2020, as new infections continued to rise in Central and South America, the Caribbean had flattened the curve. But the control measures came at a cost. The nations of the Caribbean are heavily reliant on tourism. In 2019, visitors and holidaymakers brought US $59 billion to the region. Saint Lucia lost at least $220 million in revenues last year. From June, 2020, the Caribbean began to reopen. Most countries demanded that visitors present a negative PCR test and complete a period of quarantine.

Jamaica set up a so-called ‘resilient corridor’, outside of which tourists were not permitted. St John does not think the return of tourism is the main driver behind the recent spike in cases. She points out that several countries managed to re-open their borders for several months, with few cases and no deaths. Still, it might well have been a tourist who brought the highly transmissible B.1.1.7. variant of SAR-CoV-2 to the Caribbean late last year. “There has also been a certain amount of Covid fatigue among the people here, so they have let down their guard a bit”, adds St John. Gatherings at Christmas probably contributed to a subsequent rise in cases, and there might have been too strong a focus on testing visitors, to the exclusion of the local population.

There are also country specific factors. Transmission in Belize was kick-started by people turning out to vote in the elections last November.

The UK is responsible for vaccinating populations on its overseas territories. It has dispatched 8000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to the British Virgin Islands; the vaccination drive in the Cayman Islands is well underway. Other parts of the region are expected to start vaccinating their citizens by mid-March. Some nations are relying on COVAX, a joint initiative between WHO, and Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which aims to ensure equitable worldwide distribution of the vaccines. Others have struck bilateral deals with the manufacturers. Hambleton suggests that local familiarity with hurricane preparedness primed the people of the Caribbean for lockdown and stay-at-home measures.

The region has not seen the politicisation of mask-wearing or sizeable anti-lockdown protests. Chief Medical Officers have formed WhatsApp groups to share information and direct supplies, and heads of government have worked together to oversee the pandemic response. “Our politicians have kept themselves informed of what has been happening abroad and taken a pragmatic approach”, said St John. People have been co-operative. Businesses in Barbados took it upon themselves to close their doors if they discovered an employee had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. “There has been a real sense of ‘pulling together”.

In a recent report from The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) it has found that the Covid-19 pandemic has led to the worst economic decline in Latin America and the Caribbean in two hundred years. In addition to its economic toll, the pandemic has had a devastating impact on the region’s society and health systems. Although the region represents just 8 percent of the global population, it has reported 28 percent of all deaths.

The vaccination programme for many countries in the Caribbean is proving very difficult. Although The Cayman Islands, Aruba and Monserrat have already fully vaccinated their whole population the picture in many of the other countries is very different.

Although the vaccination reporting dates vary, One World’s freely available tables indicate that the share of the Caribbean population receiving at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine varies hugely from country to country. Its data indicates that Antigua has administered at least one dose to 30 per cent of its population; Barbados and Dominica 25 per cent; St Kitts-Nevis 22 per cent; Guyana 14 per cent; St Vincent 13 per cent; St Lucia and Grenada 11 per cent; Belize 10 per cent; the Dominican Republic nine per cent; Suriname six per cent; The Bahamas six per cent; Jamaica five per cent and Trinidad two per cent.

These are, of course, snapshots and need to be treated with a degree of caution as they do not, for example, account for variations in population size, the different financial arrangements governments have entered into with commercial suppliers, those now starting to receive vaccines through the WHO’s COVAX facility, the variation in the receipt of vaccines from donors including China and India, or their subsequent sharing between nations.

In addition, in St Lucia’s case, the reporting date was in March while all the others were in mid to late April. There are also no figures for Haiti or for Cuba. However, in Cuba’s case, it is well advanced in the final phase of trialling four candidate vaccines of its own, and President Díaz-Canel has said that if as expected its Soberana 02 and Abdala vaccines are proven efficacious and licensed, the entire population will be fully vaccinated by the year’s end.

With these caveats, what is apparent is that if Caribbean economic recovery is to begin this year, employment will be restored, tourism will return in a significant way, and a viable path found out of the pandemic, many more vaccines need to be made available very soon.

Until the next time, Stay Safe

Total number of cases worldwide – 153,524,738

Total number of deaths worldwide – 3,217,179

Total number of recovered cases worldwide – 130,880,827

Active cases – 19,426,732  (12.6% of Total Cases)

Closed cases – 134,098,006

Information and statistics from:

https://www.worldometers.info/

https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/