And while the ministries shop around for utilities, Belize City's Municipal office is, yet again, in the grips of COVID-19.
You'll remember that the first Belizean to become a casualty of the disease in April of 2020, Hubert Pipesburgh, was a senior employee of the council.
Since then infection rates at City Hall have fluctuated but are once again spiking. And yesterday when our Sunup hosts sat down with the newly recovered Mayor we asked him why the council seems to be such a hotbed of Covid.
Host
"Why does City Hall seem to be like a target ground for Covid, like the breathing ground for some reason?"
Bernard Wagner, Mayor, Belize City
"The mere fact that we have over 400 plus workers and a lot of those workers are in our support team that is on the street doing street work and so they come in contact with a lot of residents. Our traffic officers, our special constable and people visiting city hall on a daily basis to do business, to carry out valuation planning, so the city hall is a high activity area and so you expect that some measure infection would happen there and by and large we have done pretty well in alleviating the spread. The first wave, we lost a staff, the second wave we experience was essentially staff-family members being infected and so that second wave didn't impact us as much, but this third wave here is more impacting the everyday staff. We have about 8 individuals right now infected with covid19 and it spans across all different departments; traffic, municipal court, valuation on the second floor, the office of the mayor as well, third floor/ Actually last week we had to shut down the third floor dur to the infection in that area. We plan to go back this week. We had the area fully sanitized and so we continue to urge our staff to practice the protocols of wearing a mask, washing your hands regularly. We have temperature checks at all our offices. We have workstation shield guards set up there, so it's just the individual has to be begin to see the importance of complying with the regulations, with the health authorities and if you as an individual is discipline and you comply, then you contribute to the reduction on infection. It starts at the individual level and it spreads to families and to communities and to the country and so we always preach that the individual must be responsible as well."
Mayor Wagner - who has had one vaccine shot - also told us that his recovery went smoothly; he simply took Tylenol for the chills and good old bush medicine for everything else.
