Obviously you are financially well off enough not to have to worry for the next few months. Most of us are not. What should we do when our resources run out and there are no prospects of jobs due to no tourists being here?

What would you do to get us out of the situation we are in?

Seeing as we never have a Government willing to make the hard decisions by trimming their expenses, we know that after the election taxes will go up (regardless of who wins). Then the unions will demand more and the Government will say yes, leading us back to square one.

Where would those bay street stores get the money from to refurb their stores? They are no doubt like all trying to work out if they can survive

Agreed, After reading the protocols for restaurants there will be plenty out of business in the next few months, and in fact most should cut their losses now and call it quits, as their model will not work charging less people the same whilst all their expense would have gone up.

Umm if civil service wage bills makes up 70% of expenses, how will cutting it not have an effect on our budget? I am not saying now is the right time to do it, but trying to see how cutting it will not affect the budget?

Those who have underlying conditions should be worried about this. They should self isolate until the vaccine comes (which may never come or could be in the next few months). However the rest do not have as much to worry, Therefore those with underlying conditions should stop being so selfish and understand the bigger picture instead of wanting everyone to not move so they are safe, even though we are at 50% unemployment and counting. But hey who needs a job.

Is he trying to get unemployment to 75%?

Lol so what you are saying is you weren't doing your job before and you will do your job now (fingers crossed?) The law has always been that a work permit is issued if there was no Bahamian who was able to do the job, but this was never followed. Anyway shall be fun to listen to the budget later which will no doubt talk about all the FDI coming in and the necessary work permits that will go with it. Government and us as a people really have to decide what we want. Do we want to be a competitive country able to move forward to the first world, in which case we actually need to reduce the barriers to people coming here. OR do we not want foreigners coming here, in which case lets admit that we aren't going to advance that fast. Before someone says it yes we can and should train our people to be able to do all these jobs. The problem is only a tiny amount of work permits is for the top jobs, and when Bahamians are trained in those they would rather leave and never come back. There are more Bahamians working in finance overseas then there are foreigners working finance here, but we never mention that.

All great, but as you said we haven't done any of that planning. What is your criteria for opening? Is it when there's a vaccine? Or only for countries which have no cases (which in effect means no tourists, and especially none from the US for a long time). If either of these then the chances of most businesses making it through this is slim, and the chances of the country making it through is even slimmer. So in effect you are in the position of not opening and damning the country or opening and hoping you don't dam the country too much. AS you can probably tell i would choose the latter.