Evacuation flights confirmed

A series of evacuation flights have been organised to help work-permit holders who have lost their jobs to leave the Cayman Islands.

Two flights are scheduled on Friday, to and from Miami, while flights to Nicaragua have also been confirmed for Saturday.

Governor Martyn Roper made the announcement at the daily coronavirus press briefing Wednesday. Cayman Airways has since published a full schedule and booking information here.

The news came as six new COVID-19 cases were reported in Cayman, and Premier Alden McLaughlin warned that a worst-case-scenario analysis had shown that up to 1,000 people in the territory could die from the virus.

He said that was the situation the island could have been facing without aggressive interventions. He vowed that government would continue with strict curfew measures and other restrictions to keep the virus under control.

Evacuation flights

Roper confirmed that two flights to Miami had been organised for Friday.

A World Atlantic Airlines flight will bring around 100 Cayman Islands residents back to the islands from the US. Those passengers will go straight into isolation facilities.

A separate Cayman Airways flight will evacuate work-permit holders who need to go back to the US. The flight will return empty to Cayman to protect the crew.

An additional two Cayman Airways flights have been arranged to Nicaragua on Saturday to evacuate around 160 people to Central America.

Flights to Canada are being worked on for next week. Discussions are continuing over flights to Honduras, Dominican Republic and Jamaica.

The governor said work would continue as long as there was demand for flights.

Worst-case scenario

McLaughlin said there could be no let-up in curfew measures, despite the ongoing economic hardship.

Citing analysis from Public Health England, he said the worst-case scenario forecast at the start of the crisis was for almost 1,000 deaths if intervention was not taken.

McLaughlin said government would not yield to pressure to reopen the economy as businesses continue to struggle.

He said he was trying to avoid sustained community transmission of the virus.

“The worst-case scenario that Public Health England gave us was almost 1,000 people projected to die in this small community [if no intervention was taken]. I want us all to think on that,” he said.

The premier said reopening the economy too early risked turning Cayman into a “mini New York” or a “mini Italy”.

He said, “The virus will fly through this community and, unlike in New York where there are hundreds of unclaimed bodies, there will not be one unclaimed body in Cayman … each person will be near and dear to a number of us.”

By next week, he said, Cayman would be in a position to begin mass testing.

He said the countries that had been successful in combatting coronavirus had pursued very targeted strategies of testing, tracing and isolating cases.

“That is the only way we will be able to really make this community safe enough to reopen business,” he added.

Six new cases

Meanwhile, the Cayman Islands has six new cases of COVID-19, taking the total number of people who have tested positive to 60.

Dr. John Lee, Cayman’s chief medical officer, said the new cases involved four people who were contacts of people who had previously tested positive, and two others who had acquired the virus locally.

In total, Cayman has tested 636 people, with 60 positive cases and 576 negative cases.

Lee said 19 people were still showing some symptoms of the virus, including six who had been admitted to hospital and one who is on a ventilator.

Six are listed as having fully recovered, which means they had tested positive and have now had two negative clearance tests. Five are “clinically recovered”, meaning they are no longer showing symptoms but have yet to be tested and cleared as negative.

George Town complex residents test negative for virus

Addressing testing of 40 people from a George Town apartment complex where a patient was revealed to have failed to isolate, Lee said all the tests had come back negative for the virus and the lockdown measures at that site have been lifted.

Lee said the number of new patients each day was not increasing and he felt generally hopeful about the situation.

“We have not seen an acceleration that we are worried about,” he added.

He said the planned increase in testing, made possible by the arrival of 165,000 new tests on island from South Korea last week, had not yet begun.

Lee said training needed to take place to ramp up lab capacity before mass testing could begin, but he is confident the new testing strategy can begin soon.

Cayman selling surplus COVID-19 tests

McLaughlin and Lee revealed that Cayman was prepared to sell up to half of its COVID-19 tests to other islands in the region.

The premier said Lee had advised that 100,000 would be enough for Cayman and its population. The island initially procured 200,000 tests, though only 165,000 of those have arrived on island, with the remainder being kept in the UK.

A deal has been agreed to sell 20,000 tests to Barbados. Bermuda has been offered the 35,000 tests currently in England but discussions are continuing over exactly how many they need.

Numerous other countries in the region, including Jamaica, St. Lucia, Belize and the Bahamas, as well as other Overseas Territories, Turks and Caicos, and the Falklands, have made inquiries. The premier said Cayman’s leaders would have to exercise the “wisdom of Solomon” to distribute those throughout the region.

Lee said he was confident that 100,000 tests would be enough for Cayman and was as many as the island could reasonably use, given other constraints around lab capacity.

Schools will remain shut

Education Minister Juliana O’Connor-Connolly also gave a lengthy presentation on the situation in the local school system, reading a list of questions and answers.

She confirmed there would be no reopening of public or private schools any time soon.

“Schools will be closed until further notice. As we continue to monitor the spread of the virus, it is not possible to provide a timeline,” she said.

Police update

Commissioner of Police Derek Byrne issued a warning to business owners about commercial burglaries in the George Town Central area.

He said cash, food and alcohol had been taken in some cases. The commissioner said police would facilitate business owners to ensure their premises were secure.

The commissioner also reported a number of new breaches of curfew, including someone who was warned for swimming with his dog at a beach in East End. The rest of the breaches involved people shopping outside of their allotted alphabet days.

Overall, there have been 285 breaches of curfew detected since the measures began; 140 files have been submitted for legal ruling, 30 rulings have come back from the office of the director of public prosecutions, and four people have been charged in the courts with curfew offences, alongside other offences. So far, just one of those four cases has been completed in court, resulting in a four-month prison sentence for the offender for breach of curfew.

The other cases are still working their way through the system.