The curfew - like it or loathe it - in the past month it has become a part of the fabric and rhythm of daily life: 8:00 pm to 5:00 am - you'd better be locked up inside or you could end up locked up in jail.
Today the Prime Minister said it has to go a little more:
Hon. Johny Briceno- Prime Minister
"If we wanted to just say okay declare victory we could have already lifted the curfew and say okay we won. But it is not just about political victory it is about protecting the lives of our citizens. So, we felt that we need to hold it a little bit longer so that whenever we remove the restrictions it's not going to flare up again one month later or a few weeks later. So we've done that. But also what we did, we came up aggressively with testing. As we were saying from earlier on, the Ministry of Health, back then, was deciding who they were going to test. We opened up the testing, we brought in the rapid test, we allowed the private sector also to set up their own clinics to do testing also, so we could test as much people as possible. And secondly we do understand and we hear the people in the tourism industry that curfew at 8 o'clock is way too restrictive for them. So we will be working on that to ensure that we can reduce the restrictions so that when our visitors are in Belize they can move around fairly safely and can enjoy a good meal at night and not have to be rushing into their bedrooms."
