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.

Have to point out that Cayman is 3 islands. Whilst i agree we need to fix the education to really do anything here, that is a long term solution which will need money in the short term to begin to fix. This above represents the short term.

Can the writer and others who support a continuation of the lockdown please provide how they expect the Government (as it will have to be them) to provide enough money for all those people who will be without a job (the thousands at Atlantis, BahaMar, all the other hotels, taxi drivers, tour operators, vendors, retail stores, restaurants, bars and on and on). That is support these people until a vaccine is found. This will be with us for a while, coming back in waves. WE as a country do not have the luxury of not opening, unless you want a complete collapse of society and all the additional problems that brings (try running PMH if the Government has no money).

A big fuss was made because it became political. Thats all. If a certain party did not think they could get mileage out of it this would have been non news. But they thought they could and they did. Don't worry if the shoe had been on the other foot the FNM would have done the same.

Why is it so hard. If a company has paid their NIB then NIB knows who works there. If the company says they are all furloughed then NIB knows who has been furloughed. Then that person applies with their bank details and presto they get paid. There is no point in NIB patting themselves on the back if people have been waiting since March to get their benefits. Sort that out and then consider patting yourselves on the back (though no need to as all you have done is your job).

I can't understand why he has not added Exuma, Eleuthera, San Salvador and Berries to the list. all of these are the same as the other islands which have been opened up. If it is true some of these are due to a motorcade then that is spiteful. If they haven't had any cases yet and you are making sure only healthy people can travel then why keep them closed. At the start we were told we would close until we flattened the curve. This has happened and still we are closed. Is the plan to see if you can make the country broke?

All great but Nassau is collapsing as well, which means there will be no money to fund the family islands anyway.

They need to do mass testing. This is a lazy way out which doesn't even solve the problem. Those showing today were infected 10-14 days ago. All along this government has not done major testing. Bimini is an ideal place to do this as the population is small. The first case was there in March, as such many others outside the 13 have probably already had it. but without testing they will never know. Seems we will shut down whole islands without knowing if most people have already had it. If we don't have enough maybe they should invite more forefingers to come over if they bring testing equipment.