 Meantime, the government of St. Lucia received six ventilators from the Pan-American Health Organization, PAHO, on December 22, 2020, to aid in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. These ventilators will significantly improve St. Lucia's capacity to treat critical patients with respiratory problems. To date, PAHO has donated personal protective equipment, oxygen concentrators, laboratory supplies, training of human resources, and many more hospital accessories, as the government responds to the pandemic. COVID-19 continues to present significant financial and critical challenges to St. Lucia as we seek to secure the health and safety of our citizens. PAHO's assistance to St. Lucia has certainly assisted in cushioning the financial burden posed by COVID-19. Reports on the part of the government of St. Lucia continue in accommodating nationals who are desirous of returning home as global coronavirus infection rates continue to surge. Details in this report by Jesse Leos. The COVID-19 Command Center confirms that it is open to non-pulitive options to repatriate stranded nationals who entered Martinique illegally. As of 12th January, the French territory recorded 6,227 infections and 43 deaths associated with the coronavirus. The island reopened its airports in the new year, but St. Lucia authorities remain concerned by their staggering rates of transmission. Chairman of the COVID-19 Command Center, Hon. Dominic Fede, acknowledges the idea of voluntary repatriation, however indicates that the overall approach to travel between the two islands is yet to be determined. Absolutely, we've been in talks with the solution authorities in Martinique to see through our counselling there how we could return to some normalcy in travel. We have been in dialogue with local agents of the ferry services to see how that could be done. Obviously, it's not an easy decision, but we have to remain open and certainly the cases in Martinique and the situation that exists in Martinique remains a source of concern. Meanwhile, the arrival of many other nationals' desires of returning home have been delayed in an effort to reduce home-based quarantine, which has been challenging to police. Hon. Fede says it is a difficult and sensitive thing to tell a national that they cannot return home but emphasise the priority of reducing home-quarantine breaches and any other threat to public health and safety. We had about 1600 applications for people to come home over Christmas and I don't think that we could have accommodated all of them because of the quarantine space that we had and I think we did close to what a third of that is we have tried to manage how many we can accommodate using the quarantine cycle. So if we have looked at our quarantine space and the capacity that we have to secure home quarantine so we have tried to reduce the number of returning nationals that we would have on home quarantine as well as making sure that we also do a balance and a cross-check of how many people we can accommodate in institutional quarantine. Hon. Fede addressing repatriation during the St. Lucia Tourism Authority's first press conference of the year. For the Government Information Service, I am Jesse Leance reporting.