Anyone know which country this Russell Benford hails from? He can't possibly be a patriotic Bahamian!

The UK is now a raging hot spot for Covid-19 with the number of identified cases rising exponentially with each passing hour. Our government should be suspending all travel between the Bahamas and the UK with immediate effect, at least for the next 30 days. Spain is about to go into total lockdown if it has not done so already. And notwithstanding Italy's lockdown, the virus has taken thousands of lives. Europe is definitely the new epicentre for Covid-19 and the Bhamas should have rigorous air and sea passenger travel restrictions imposed on all European countries for at least the next 30 days.

My panic set in immediately after the outcome of the May 2017 general election. Hubert Ingraham did our country a great disservice by his dreadful sore loser conduct following his last defeat to Perry Christie. Ingraham left a great vacuum rather than attempting to assist in finding a suitably qualified successor leader for the FNM as the minority government following Christie's win. That fateful mistake by Ingraham allowed the very incompetent, arrogant and nasty Minnis to bully his way to the leadership post of the then FNM minority government. The vast majority of the Bahamian people are now paying a very dear price for Ingraham's sore loser behavior at that most critical point in time in the history of politics in our country.

They are only just now making this info public! Unbelievable!

As usual, the Minnis-led FNM government is reactive rather than proactive and therefore always much too little is done much too late. This is the pathetic hallmark of Minnis and his fellow cabinet ministers.

Family or no family, it only takes one infected asymptomatic visitor to a nursing home. Nursing home staff unfortunately also present a great risk of transmission if they are not properly equipped to contain the spreading of the Covid-19 virus.

This is all utter nonsense and just as bad as letting this Covid-19 carrier dock at one of our major ports. Bahamians and British personnel resident in the Bahamas who step foot on this infectious ship to interact with its crew and/or passengers are at great risk of being infected with Covid-19 and will therefore be endangering the lives of many Bahamians when they return to shore.

What should have been done is simple. The UK government should have arranged with the US government for the US Coast Guard to use one or more of its helicopters to air drop the necessary supplies, medicines, etc. on to this most dangerous ship. Our government should have only allowed access to our territorial waters for that singular purpose and should have otherwise completely stayed out of this matter.

We are a small highly vulnerable island nation that has nowhere near the resources that the US and UK governments can devote to this matter by liaising directly with each other. Minnis needs to stop trying to win foreign friends and start solely focusing on protecting the Bahamian people and residents of the Bahamas from this deadly pandemic. Why didn't Minnis himself put the simple US Coast Guard helicopter solution to the British High Commission in The Bahamas? Where is this man's common sense and sense of duty to the Bahamian people?! US Coast Guard ships could also assist with any necessary refueling so that this ship can get on its way to a destination other than The Bahamas.

This is gross misinformation very deliberately disseminated on an untimely basis to the public by the Minnis-led FNM government in much the same way they fed us gross misinformation about the death toll from Hurricane Dorian on a most untimely basis.

What government and our healthcare officials are ***not*** telling us is that they simply do not have the means to conduct extensive testing to determine how widespread Covid-19 already is within the Bahamas and especially on New Providence. The Minnis-led FNM government made a huge misstake very early on by not shutting down all cruise ship travel to our ports.

Sheer greed and complete disregard for human safety resulted in the cruise lines building bigger and bigger ships, to the point where they cannot both be operated profitably and properly cleaned between cruises. To be competitively profitable these monstrous floating hotels must spend a minimum number of days each year at sea loaded with as many passengers as possible. In other words, to continue profitably operating these gigantic ships they must remain as ***un***clean as possible without detection of their filthiness by the human eye. And that's the conundrum the cruise lines now face as public health officials all over the world are coming to the realization that these grossly over-sized ships cannot possibly be profitably operated safely.

These monstrous floating hotels are doomed by their sheer size alone to always be the ideal breeding ground and transmission environment for harmful and/or deadly pathogens like Covid 19. Hopefully public health officials the world over will now put an end to this industry if the foolish patrons of these cruise lines up to now do not do so themselves. And to think Minnis and D'Aguilar have been working over-time since May 2017 to put all of our country's fragile economic eggs in this filthy and greedy industry's basket.

LMAO

Who does this fool Russell Benford think he's fooling? All of us know only too well from decades of past experience what the very greedy business model and modus operandi of the cruise ship companies like Royal Caribbean is all about. It's all about great profits and wealth for Royal Caribbean with nothing but a few crumbs thrown our way in exchange for decades of outrageouly genrous concessions combined with the privilege of polluting our most pristine environment to their hearts content.