 Hello and welcome to another edition of Issues and Answers, a production of the Government Information Service. I am Lisa Joseph. In this episode, we focus in on the management of the national effort, the fight against COVID-19. And since the COVID-19 virus came on to the global scene, St. Lucia has had its ups and downs, but we've been able, in the main, to have a grasp on COVID-19. We are beginning to see the resolution of our fourth wave here in St. Lucia. At the height of this fourth wave, we had in excess of 2,800 St. Lucia infected with the virus. Unfortunately, we've also had nearly 300 deaths as a result of COVID-19. St. Lucia lost to this dreaded virus. But we are pressing on. And in a bold move, the Government of St. Lucia has decided to change the tone on how it approaches the management of COVID-19. And it has done so through an amendment of the COVID-19 Prevention and Control Act amendment number two of 2021. That amendment brought with it the inclusion of expansion of the entity that looks over the management of COVID-19, makes the decisions with regard to how we respond to the pandemic. At the helm of this entity right now, which is the National COVID-19 Management Center, is an individual who has such an expanse when it comes to our experience. He is served as a permanent secretary in the Ministry of Tourism and Public Utilities from 1992 to 1994. The Ministry of Planning, Development, Environment and Housing between 1994 and 1997 was an advisor policy and strategy development with the OECS Commission between 1998 and 2001. He also ran a consulting practice that advised government in the Caribbean, Asia, the Pacific and Latin America regions between 2001 and 2008. He also dealt with intergovernmental entities such as CARICOM, UNDP, ECLAC, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the World Bank, PAHO, the OAS, among others in the area of sustainable development. He's a former chairman and program advisor on green economy with Canary. He serves as a director, one of the directors on PANOS Caribbean and as a president, and I think he's very fond of this, president of the Impact Foundation, Incorporated. It's a family foundation dedicated to assisting youth at risk here in St. Lucia. He's a graduate of the University of the West Indies in public administration and mass communications. Also graduate of the Oxford Brooks University of Auburn, planning there and Aberdeen University, graduating there with environmental impact assessment degree. He's also a visiting scholar at the George Washington University's Energy and Environmental Management Institute. Most recently, he's 12 years as director of sustainable development of the OAS and that's based in Washington, D.C. Such an expansive curriculum, I'm going to read you a resume there and I'm speaking about none other than Mr. Cletus Springer, who has returned to St. Lucia to serve his country. We want to say thank you so much, sir, for your service, first of all. And welcome back home. Okay, it's good to be back home. And Reid, going through the resume and this is just really narrowing it down, you have had such an interesting life, first of all, and you've been able to leverage your talents, your skillsets to be able to benefit all of these international organizations here at home for a while, but in a lot of the international organizations. I want to ask you about your return here to St. Lucia. We mentioned earlier that retirement, yes. But certainly when the pandemic began, and I'm interested in knowing your thoughts, you were based in Washington at the time, what were your thoughts about your home country, St. Lucia, once the pandemic became a matter of international concern? Thank you, Lisa, and it's good to be here. Yeah, that's a question that really explains why I'm in this role, because from the United States, when I looked at what was happening in the U.S. and globally, I knew that St. Lucia would have a severe challenge. I mean, there you have countries that have infinitely more resources than we do, struggling with this virus, the candidates, the United States, the Great Britons, the United Kingdom, and so on. And you see that happening and you know that we're going to have a challenge. So all of what happened here in St. Lucia did not surprise me or do it concern me. From a personal standpoint, I have lost about, between my wife and I, we have lost about a dozen members of our joint families to COVID. Some of them were passed away in New York that we were not able to go to the funerals. Some of them were passed away since we returned here. And these experiences combined registered in me a desire to do whatever I could to help my country. I did not aim to be in the position that I am now. I thought that I would be in a situation where I would just feed some policy ideas to the CMO and those which I started doing from the U.S. actually. I used to scan, as part of my job, I used to scan the epidemiological survey and strategies of other countries. And I would share that with the CMO. I remember doing a paper on India's survey and strategy. And I shared that with CMO. So even before coming here, I had begun to take an interest in what was happening and what could be done. And I had started to feed ideas and so on to the administration. COVID-19 is new to the world. The playbook keeps changing all the time. So your skill sets, because some might think maybe someone who has a medical background will be best suited to chair the National COVID-19 Management Center. So how does your experience, your skill set dovetail into the management of COVID-19? And how can you parlay those skills to our benefit? I like that word parlay. So as I was explaining, in the summer of 2014, 2015, I can't remember precisely. I did a 12-week intensive course. It's called a mini-med, a mini-MD course at Georgetown University. And that was a concentrated course. All of the courses that are taught over the seven years of a medical degree at Georgetown were compressed into those 12 weeks. And we were taught by the same lecturers that taught the doctors, pharmacology, internal medicine, you know, cardiology. We did all of these courses. And after I did that, and before I did that, sorry, I was also a member of the Health Review Commission, Institution 2000, before I went to the OAS, I was in 2004. That commission, which was chaired by deceased Sir Richard Haynes of Barbados, of which I was a member. We took an in-depth examination of all of the issues that are associated with healthcare in solution. And that experience gave me, I thought, a unique perspective on the health situation here. We looked at everything from the working conditions, the doctors. You know, we also projected into the planning for St. Jude's and so on. So I had that experience with me at the forefront. But even so, even with that background, I did not see my role on the center as being a health-specific role. The role I saw for myself and where I saw the best fit between what the role, the job requires in my training is epidemiological surveillance and planning. Because epidemiological surveillance is really where health and geography meet. Right? And I'm coming at it from the geography side with a little knowledge of health. But we have the CMO and we have a whole team of people that she has access to. So I don't delve into the clinical issues. I wouldn't be able to tell you what treatments are helpful. That's not my role. My role is to examine the intersection of epidemiology, right? And the strategy that is needed to combat this. So my focus is on where the hotspots of infection are. What is happening there relative to the movement of people from that point to other points. Is there a link between the infections in the transportation system? Right? From the hot points to other points. You know, these kinds of considerations are what I bring to the table. So it's my planning background, strategic planning, my communications, and my knowledge of the public service. And my understanding of the people of St. Lucia. And you just sort of apprehended what I was going to ask you because a lot of St. Lucia and they hear about the management center. And the belief is that you have a group of individuals who are simply sitting by and dictating to them what should be. But you've just given us a little glimpse there of some of the what are the sort of factors that really drives what leads you to make those decisions. When you are having those discussions and you are examining what the data is revealing to you, and you sit and you say, well, we have to have confinement for our people. We may have to make it a little tighter than normal. What are the immediate thoughts when you are trying to make those decisions to the benefit of the population, but you know it will not be well received? Yeah. And that is where you've heard repeated reference to the science more often than not. But that's really what it is. And confinements are in the toolbox of every country that has dealt with this. Some refer to it as circuit breakers. Some refer to it as the light switch and so on. But basically what it is, is if you're seeing a trend that says to you if that trend continues, your capacity to cope will be overwhelmed, right? Your bed space in the hospitals, your intensive care capabilities, your availability of nurses, your availability of doctors, the ability of the government to buy oxygen, and all of the treatments that are required for you. If you see that trend, you are on an obligation to do something. In a situation like that, doing nothing is not an option. Now, where all of the tensions arise is what is the something you must do? And how effective that is. And people have their own views on how effective confinements, which is not a nice term, but how effective these are. In our case, I think the data is very clear. At the peak of our fourth wave, in the fourth wave, I think we had about 7,000, just over 7,000 cases. In the third wave, we had about 5,000. So it's very clear that the fourth wave has been far more severe than the third. But we're in a situation now where from that peak of about 7,000 cases, we are now down to just about 350 active cases. Okay, now you might argue, what has brought this about? Is it the lockdowns? Is it the confinement? Is it people's strong adherence to the protocols? It could be any or all of these. But the fact is, we have now a situation that is more manageable than we had before. And we'll talk more about how we continue to manage under the other side of the break. We're speaking here with the Chairman for the National COVID-19 Management Center, is Mr. Cleeter Springer. Stay with us. We are working parents. And we breastfed both babies exclusively. Mother's breast milk is naturally the best milk for baby. Love yourself and love your baby. Breastfeeding saves me money and it's free. Every moment I breastfeed strengthens the bond between me and my baby. I breastfed twin boys and lost all my baby fats. And we have breast milk power. I am Pastor Alvin and I support breastfeeding. For more information, call the Nutrition Unit of the Ministry of Health and Wellness at 468-5359. Thank you for staying with us. You're watching Issues and Answers, production of the government information service. We here with Mr. Cleeter Springer is the Chairman for the National COVID-19 Management Center. Before we went to break, we were going to start talking about the whole management of the situation that we are in. We're beginning to see the resolution, as I said earlier, for the fourth wave of COVID-19. The World Health Organization, Pan American Health Organization, called for all the saying that vaccination is the key for St. Lucia and the rest of the world. We need to vaccinate our way out of COVID-19. Vaccination, though, remains such a hotly debated topic. But the first thing is access to the vaccines. Coming on board with the Management Center, what can you tell us about where we're at and how are we faring in being able to identify and source vaccines? Because the government has made it clear that vaccines will continue to be free to the public and as much as possible to give choice when it comes to vaccination. Right, well, vaccine procurement is not easy. If we did not have the benefit of the Covax, I would suggest that we would be in a very bad place where vaccines can serve. Because the procurement of the vaccine is not something that you can go on the world market and buy. The supply of the early dosages will come in there by the more powerful countries. And they locked in far more vaccines than they needed for the population. And so we have a situation now where there was a supply situation, not because necessarily there was a strong demand, but these countries what they did was just, they locked in the orders and they just sat on it. Because the rate of uptake in their countries themselves were not as fast as the amount of stock of vaccine that they needed. So that created a serious supply situation down the line for countries like ourselves. So Covax has been a huge boon to our efforts, not just in St. Lucia, but across the developing world in getting these vaccines. So we are at the point where now the Covax supply that we receive plus the supply received from the US is what we've been using now almost exclusively. We have an expiration issue with the vaccine and that's one of the reasons why we've gone on this accelerator to drive rather than have to dispose of the vaccines and so on, they encourage people to take a second dose. So if between four and six months of your first dose, we're encouraging you to come in for a booster. And we're going on this accelerator to drive to try and get as many people to come in as possible. The other countries that ironically that are in such a better place than us, that they've run out of vaccines and some have made requests of us, if you can share some of our excess supply. So please listen, kids that are at 70% vaccination, Barbados is somewhere between 40 and 60% and so on. So you have, St. Lucia is a laggard, we are laggard, we are about 10th in Eastern Caribbean. We are now at 23.3% of our population and one almost one in five, which is absolutely dismal. And so we need to kick that up, but we are wondering now whether we may have reached a saturation rate with the vaccine uptake because what we're seeing now is a trickle. We got an average, I would say about 100 a day and that's just off my head. Part of the issue may be about timing of vaccine availability and people's work schedules and so on. Some people have said to us that in the morning it's difficult for them during the day, some people say the weekends is not good. So finding the ideal time for that is not easy. We are looking as well as accelerating our mobile vaccination strategy, but all of that is dependent on the availability of nurses. That's really what it comes down to. And now we have a little bandwidth because the cases are down. So we are able to move nurses from areas of high demand to deploy them into the vaccination effort, but that's where we are with it. It's not a nice situation. Have you been able to determine whether information is factors into the hesitancy? What we have now is a battle between information and disinformation and misinformation. So people ask, they see this of me all the time. They think the information needs to be boosted, but it's not just a case of putting more information on there. If you go on a program and you see vaccines are safe, and then a TV station puts on a one hour program where you have a group of doctors casting doubt on the vaccines, you're not gonna succeed. You're not gonna succeed because you have the wealth of that information contrasting with what you're saying. And this is not, it's a continuous flow. It just keeps on coming and coming and coming. But vaccines have always been safe. They are perhaps the safest form of mass treatment in pandemics than we've ever found. Only today it was found that the HPV vaccine, the human papillovirus vaccine has been found to be effective in COVID, in not COVID, sorry, in cancer, right? So viral cancer. Only today that came out. So vaccines have always been safe. It has been used for travel for decades, even not centuries. The United States just recently passed a policy that says anybody entering the United States must be vaccinated or you can't get on the plane. And that is the quick, the reality, the world over. And so for St. Lucia, we have to follow what that prescription is, what is happening globally. So that brings me to ask about the sort of a public sentiment that COVID-19 on the remedy, which is vaccination, is perhaps now fueling discrimination in the society, segregation even, the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated. For the COVID management center, are you concerned about that? And if so, how do you propose to address this? We are concerned because what the impact it is having is creating the potential for future waves with even more deadly effect. And there are gonna be future waves. There are gonna be other pandemics. And so we have to decide as a country how we want to proceed on this. I think we need to, one of the concerns that I've had personally since coming back and sensing that role in this role is how do people view death? How do they view the loss of their lives? How do they view costly hospitalization? And hospitalization may be free here, but what if you have to go overseas? What if your entire life savings have to go into your care? COVID has, as you know, there's long COVID. There are all kinds of complications that come out of COVID that can wipe out your savings just like that. COVID is no different to any other disease that people are concerned about. It's no different to cancer, right? When people, if people know that there's a drug tomorrow, that purports to cure cancer. Will people not take it on the basis of the same concerns they have about COVID? So it's a lot of, for lack of a better word, strange sentiment that is coming into play there that is almost counterintuitive, counterintuitive to what we know people, how people view healthcare. Okay, when I go to my doctor's office for checkup, I see the little old ladies from farmers, fishers and so on, come to the doctor's office and pay $200 a visit. Right? And they take it out from the, especially the old ladies, they take it out from the, the grass. Yeah, special hiding spot. Yeah, and I have to tell you, that hurts me. It almost makes me cry because I notice people work hard for that money. But there you are giving it up. And you're giving it up because you have an illness and you want to live. There's no difference between that and COVID. Unless you want to believe that COVID does not exist. But we have the evidence. We have the PSAs that go out every night. Testimonials where people say that, you know, they really thought that they were going to die, et cetera, et cetera. So I am transferring that knowledge that we have of people in the way they view healthcare and the COVID and it doesn't make sense. So as a chairman of a center, I'm thinking of that and I'm saying, how do we navigate, you know, between what we know to be the norm or used to be the norm with people's healthcare and what we see now, it just does not make sense. Returning to normal. We have two minutes on the clock. I know it's a very loaded topic to approach, but we can't stay confined forever. And so we now need to be able to find our way into existing continuum of life but being safe at the same time. I know that the center has been given lots of thoughts to this. We're beginning to see that sort of emergence. We've now had confinement moved to 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. on weekdays. So as we begin to approach the festive season, what are some of the thoughts going into how we are going to manage because everyone wanted back to normal. They want their lives, especially for Christmas time. Yeah, but Christmas is a big deal for us. We're going to be meeting next week to plan for Christmas exclusively, drawing on the lessons and experiences we had from the last Christmas season. You know, Lisa, I'll tell you this. Before I came back to St. Lucia, so between March of 2020 and February of 2021 when no vaccines were available in the United States. I lived a pretty normal life. I got on the bus. I took the train. I went for walks four times a week, whatever. And I carried my hand sanitizer in my pocket. I wore my mask. I stayed away from crowded places. You know, you can do these things and not get COVID. If you decide you're not going to take the vaccine, that's the only other option you have. You know, so in relation to the upcoming Christmas season, our people are the ones who can decide how they want to enjoy this, how they want to do this. You know, you have to treat everybody you meet as a potential vector of COVID because we are the ones who carry it. And you have to just take the precautions to ensure you don't get ill. So that takes away all the discussion about the vaccine. It takes away all the discussion about confinement and so on. It is possible. I did it. A number of people did. There was no vaccine at the time and no discussion about, you know, I'm saying. So we can do it. It just requires all of us to take personal responsibility for our lives and our livelihoods. And that's as simple as that, COVID is a simple issue. But I want to thank you so much. You've been speaking there with the chairman for the National COVID-19 Management Center, the Secreta Springer. It is our first of many engagements with the center. So you can really look forward to more conversations on the government information service and national television network. I am Lissa Joseph on this episode of Issues and Answers.