Dear Mr. Premier,
I have observed that you went from touting your government’s plan to improve communication by setting up a COVID-19 media team sans any private press to shutting down the live press conferences and substituted weekly statements.
This shutting out of the press was further exacerbated by your Minister of Health and Education, who should be one of the key figures in ensuring the public is kept informed, ignoring requests for information. This decision filtered down to his team who have not answered the questions repeatedly being sent via email and through other means for clarity and more information on the ongoing situation. Disparaging and disregarding the use of social media as a means for the public to share their opinions is ironic, when this was one of the main tools used to help you in the 2019 General Elections. Sorry, private media and social media won’t be going away.
It is not a good look or a smart one to shut off communication to private media in the middle of a national and global crisis.
We have questions which continue to be posed to us by the public and it would be nice to get answers.
- What are the plans for our children as it relates to returning to physical classrooms?
- Have the laptops which were purchased for students arrived and is the amount adequate to support the continued learning of our children?
- Does every student at MSS have access to the internet to be able to participate in the online classes?
- How will our students make up for the lost weeks of learning? Are there plans to extend the school term into the summer?
- What is your position on civil servants, who are also parents of young children no longer able to go to school, being asked to use vacation days to care for them?
- Do the number of people tested for COVID-19 include the retests for patients? If so, what is the actual number of people tested for the virus?
- Now that a testing machine has arrived, who gets priority for testing? Is there a plan for national testing? If so, what is it?
