Sascha Wil­son

T&T Coali­tion of Bars & Restau­rants pres­i­dent Teron Mo­han is com­plain­ing that the in­dus­try has been tak­ing a beat­ing and is be­ing used as a scape­goat in this pan­dem­ic.

In a press re­lease yes­ter­day, Mo­han de­fend­ed his mem­bers against state­ments dur­ing the May 22 COVID-19 me­dia con­fer­ence, at­tend­ed by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and Epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds, that point­ed fin­gers at bars for the spike in cas­es.

“We have tak­en care­ful note of state­ments at­trib­ut­able to Dr Hinds with re­gards to his opin­ion that “clo­sure of restau­rants, bars, etc. on April 29 and peo­ple rush­ing for last lap,” may be re­spon­si­ble for the re­cent spike to which they have not put for­ward any em­pir­i­cal ev­i­dence to sup­port such a state­ment,” he said.

He added, “Our in­dus­try has tak­en beat­ing af­ter beat­ing and quite un­fair­ly by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Min­istry of Health for the COVID re­sponse team, in par­tic­u­lar, Dr Av­ery Hinds.

“Us­ing our in­dus­try as the scape­goat when there are many in­dus­tries that has less health and safe­ty pro­to­cols than us is disin­gen­u­ous, to say the least.”

Us­ing the “sci­ence” giv­en by the COVID re­sponse team, he said Gov­ern­ment had im­ple­ment­ed re­stric­tions on their busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ties and the amount of peo­ple al­lowed to be in their es­tab­lish­ments at any one point in time. While the last num­ber giv­en was five, he said restau­rants had a 50 per cent ca­pac­i­ty for din­ing with­out the ser­vice of al­co­hol.

“We have been un­der re­stric­tions for quite some time now, and by and large, the ma­jor­i­ty of the pro­pri­etors of our es­tab­lish­ments ad­here to the health and safe­ty pro­to­cols as set out by the Min­istry of Health. As with any busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ty, there will be er­rant ones, but we have been com­ply­ing with­out com­plain­ing,” he said.

He plead­ed with Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh and Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO) Dr Roshan Paras­ram to di­rect their em­ploy­ees to stick to the facts and not opin­ions. Com­plain­ing that the in­dus­try con­tin­ues to be un­fair­ly at­tacked, he said, “Many of our mem­bers have been hurt­ing silent­ly and are at wits end, how to do our civic du­ty and be the de­fend­ers of our COVID re­sponse when we are al­ways be­ing at­tacked by the opin­ions of lead­ing pro­fes­sion­als. Our es­teemed Prime Min­is­ter, Dr Row­ley, had once said that we are all in this to­geth­er, so why are we al­ways be­ing sin­gled out and un­fair­ly tar­get­ed.”