Working class vulnerable during pandemic – disaster coordinator

Western Bureau:

Tamoy Sinclair, the disaster coordinator at the St James Municipal Corporation, has said the coronavirus pandemic has provided the corporation with an insight into how to provide for persons such as the working-class individuals who became vulnerable when the tourism sector shut its doors.

According to the parish coordinator, the disaster unit at the corporation had to engage international partners, whose countries were impacted by the virus, to get best practice strategies in responding to the needs of the working class, who became vulnerable.

“There was a need now to support the vulnerable, and no longer was the vulnerable the usual elderly and children,” said Sinclair. “We are accustomed to the working class not being vulnerable, but now the working class was vulnerable because in a short period they were unemployed and faced a form of poverty that many of them had no idea how to deal with it.”

Sinclair, who was speaking on Wednesday at the inaugural hosting of the University of the West Indies Caribbean Sustainable cities conference, which looked at the lesson learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, said some glaring needs were exposed.

ADDRESSING THE GAPS

“There was a need to address the gaps in our health services and we had to deal with the general loss of income in the population in St James,” said Sinclair, who noted that the majority of the people employed in the parish are employed in the tourism sector.

“When the tourism sector closed down, a lot of the working class was out of jobs and were now at home and in the vulnerable group,” said Sinclair. “So no longer were our vulnerable the elderly and children, we now had to focus on another definition of what vulnerable means, in this COVID-19 pandemic.”

Sinclair further noted that there was a need for collective resources, human and material, to prepare for the unknown, noting that the disaster unit in its early stages had minimal ideas on what was the exact type of resources and quantity needed to respond to the new category of vulnerable citizens from the working class.

“Although we always had communications with various agencies, it [COVID] heightens the need for serious dialogue to see how it is we could work together closely to address this pandemic that we are facing, because a lot of us have no idea as to what it is that we are facing,” said Sinclair shared.