De­ject­ed. Re­signed. Be­trayed. Con­demned.

This is how res­i­dents of Brook­lyn Set­tle­ment, San­gre Grande yes­ter­day de­scribed their feel­ings to­wards the de­ci­sion by the Min­istry of Health to re­lo­cate 30 re­cov­er­ing COVID-19 pa­tients to a step-down fa­cil­i­ty in their area.

Un­der a tight se­cu­ri­ty blan­ket on Sat­ur­day night, the pa­tients were bused to an el­der­ly care fa­cil­i­ty—Ag­ing At Home (AAH)—at Bridge Road.

The large co­hort ar­rived closed to mid­night as many res­i­dents slept, es­cort­ed by sol­diers and po­lice of­fi­cers who have con­tin­ued to main­tain a pres­ence around the perime­ter of the prop­er­ty.

Ques­tion­ing why this high hand­ed ap­proach was tak­en even as they await­ed word re­gard­ing the re­quest for a vir­tu­al meet­ing with the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties to dis­cuss their con­cerns be­fore a fi­nal de­ci­sion was made, the scared res­i­dents said the move is a clear sig­nal that their views and wish­es are not re­spect­ed.

One man said, “We are now won­der­ing if this is a case of par­ty pol­i­tics at play. That fa­cil­i­ty was va­cant for some time, and sud­den­ly, we hear it is to be used as a con­va­les­cent home for the COVID-19 peo­ple.”

It is un­clear if and how much the own­er is be­ing paid per month for the use of the fa­cil­i­ty.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh has ad­mit­ted that the State is pay­ing the Sev­enth Day Ad­ven­tist As­so­ci­a­tion $85,000 per month for the use of its’ fa­cil­i­ty, Camp Ba­lan­dra, which was ini­tial­ly used to house 68 pas­sen­gers who had re­turned from a cruise which had re­port­ed COVID-19 pos­i­tive cas­es.

He has said some fa­cil­i­ties will be pro­vid­ed free of charge, while the State will have to pay for oth­ers.

An el­der­ly woman from Bridge Road ex­pressed her feel­ings of de­spair as she said, “I feel very de­pressed be­cause they take these peo­ple and bring them here…this is putting me at risk. We can’t do any­thing about it, we just have to ac­cept it.”

A young woman liv­ing close to the AAH fa­cil­i­ty ex­pressed con­cern, “We want­ed to dis­cuss all these things be­fore any­thing was done.

“We asked for a meet­ing so these is­sues could have been ad­dressed and the con­cerns of the res­i­dents es­pe­cial­ly the el­der­ly ones, could have been dealt with. Why did they move the pa­tients in so late at night? What is it that they don’t want us to see? What are they hid­ing?”