The Premier said the vigorous contact tracing being conducted by local health officials is likely to generate new cases from primary and secondary contacts of current positive cases.

“It’s better to do this hard contact tracing now … and get to know what it is that you have to deal with and then we will be in a better position,” Fahie stated during a recent interview with video JTV.

“Once we get those and we get the primary contacts of those, we feel that we would be able to contain it then.

Will take a collective effort to solve crisis

Premier Fahie also said contact tracing alone will not solve the current crisis and called on all residents to adhere to the various COVID-19 protocols so the number of cases can be heavily reduced by next month.

“When I talk about mid-October to the end of October, that is the area that I am talking about that will see us in the light of looking at the other phases. By then, we should have this problem under handle but we have to do a lot ourselves to help us to reach that deadline that we are talking about.”

To assist with the venture, the Premier alluded to the recently announced Social Monitoring Task Force which will be assisting with monitoring businesses across the territory to ensure full compliance of all COVID-19 protocols.

“That has to be a new unit that is very aggressive out there. They’re going to be going around and making sure that every single business is adhering to the measures and if not, they are fined,” he said.

The BVI is currently classified as having clusters of COVID-19 with 38 active cases in various communities across the territory.