(Progressive Liberal Party Leader Philip “Brave” Davis delivered the following address to the nation on the COVID crisis on Monday, August 30, 2021)
My fellow Bahamians,
This August has been the worst month for our country since the start of the pandemic.
We have seen more than three thousand new confirmed cases this month alone, with many more uncounted or undiagnosed.
We have had more than 18,000 confirmed cases in our country.
Every day brings new tragedies.
We are losing too many people. We are losing mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, beloved grandparents and siblings and children; we are losing friends and teachers and nurses and neighbors.
There are too many empty places at the family dinner table, and too many heavy hearts.
Mine is one of them. I have had so many people reach out to me in recent weeks, sharing terrible news, sharing their anguish and loss.
It is not only sorrow that I feel. I also feel tremendous anger and frustration — because while it was always going to be a challenging and difficult time, it didn’t have to be this bad.
Our hospitals and clinics are collapsing – with doctors and nurses saying they are “past the breaking point”.
And we are not only losing COVID patients – we don’t have enough beds, or staff, or resources, for other patients, so patients who need hospital care are sent home, when they would normally be treated in hospital, or they don’t go to the hospital in the first place, knowing how bad things are. Some patients in the Family Islands who need to be flown in for an ICU bed have not able to do so. In this way, our tragedies and losses are compounding. For all the tragedies that are visible to us, there are many more families suffering.
It’s important to understand that this collapse of public health was not inevitable – the collapse is the result of bad policy decisions made by a government that either wasn’t smart enough to know better or didn’t care enough to do better.
Here’s a link to the complete address: https://plpbahamas.org/exiting-the-covid-crisis-the-way…/
