Senator John Le Fondré said that his focus remained on keeping Covid cases low so that the vaccination programme did not stall. He added that the impact of reopening non-essential shops – due to happen today – and the resumption of close-contact services next week would need to be analysed before any more decisions were made.
‘I cannot give a timeframe,’ he said when asked about hospitality during this week’s coronavirus press conference. Hospitality businesses have been closed, except for takeaway, since a circuit-breaker was put in place during the first week of December.
‘All I can tell you is that in stage three [of the reopening process] it does talk about some hospitality businesses that serve food being able to reopen – that’s cafés and hotels. But not everything in stage three starts on day one.
‘We want to assess the impact of non-essential retail and close-contact businesses opening up and then we can carefully consider the next stages.’
Senator Le Fondré added that the government planned to have given almost all of the Island’s most vulnerable residents – around 50,000 people – their first jab before the end of March and he did not want to risk stalling the vaccination programme. He said: ‘We really want to avoid having to go backwards, if we possibly can.’
In recent weeks the number of people arriving into the Island has decreased dramatically but positive cases of Covid-19 are still being detected by the arrivals testing process.
Asked whether the government was considering introducing pre-departure testing, Senator Le Fondré said that by the time it could be implemented it may be disproportionate based on how many Islanders would be vaccinated by then. He added that border controls were an issue he was due to discuss later this week.
Meanwhile in Guernsey, suspicions are growing that the more contagious UK variant of coronavirus – detected in the island last month – is the cause of a big spike in cases there. As of yesterday, Guernsey had 306 active cases.
However, Jersey’s Health Minster Richard Renouf said that while it was safe to assume the variant was also in Jersey, random swab samples sent to Porton Down – a military scientific facility near Salisbury – had not revealed evidence of the strain. ‘We have been advised that our safest bet is to assume it is here in the Island, given its prevalence in the UK and our connections with the UK. We are proceeding on that basis,’ he said.
