Governor Martyn Roper has acknowledged concerns within the community about the continued mask mandate, but stated the ultimate decision on the matter remains with government.
“This is a matter for the Chief Medical Officer and the Minister for Health, Ms. Turner. Obviously, I’m part of the discussions around that, but these are matters for them,” Roper said as he addressed the issue Wednesday evening, when he appeared on the Cayman Compass talkshow ‘The Resh Hour’ which returned this week.
He said discussions around the continuation of regulations will be held soon and it will be decided whether there will be a relaxing of the remaining rules.
“I do expect to see our policy change. I think we’ve got the [ongoing regulations] now until the end of June, but I expect there will be discussions soon about that decision point and clearly, the government will be taking a decision at that point based on how many people we have in hospital, how much COVID we have in the community and you know, basically where we are,” Roper said.
However, he said, he does expect “a sort of positive evolution” in the regulations.
“Our tourism industry is getting back to normal, but still quite some way off from where we were. I think we need to look at this in the round as well and take the best decisions for the community and the economy as a whole,” he said.
The governor said he has had conversations with members of the community on the mask mandate and is aware of the concerns.
“I know there’s a lot of people who think that we should be be removing the mask mandate now and I think a lot of people are concerned that our children in schools are having to wear masks every day and yet we have lots of tourists coming in on cruise ships or stayover tourists who are not really wearing masks, whether it’s in restaurants or when they go about the islands. I recognise there’s a lot of strong feeling on this,” Roper said as he addressed the issue.
However, he said, the Chief Medical Officer took the decisions that she did for good reasons and Cayman has had a cautious approach to managing COVID from the very beginning, which has worked.
“We have one of the best responses of anywhere in the world and the numbers of people who have died in Cayman is very, very low and that is the key figure,” he said.
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