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And in the coming weeks, those who are stuck on San Pedro definitely don’t want to be there. As we’ve been reporting, a number of persons were caught off guard by Monday’s sudden declaration of a lockdown for an island. That stopped all flights and water taxi runs. A number of islanders were stuck in the city, and a number of persons from the mainland were stuck on San Pedro. They desperately wanted to leave and Dr. Marvin Manzanero explains that a few have, but the departure of persons from the island is controlled on a case by case basis. 

Dr. Marvin Manzanero - Director of Health Services
"Persons in San Pedro who want to go home to mainland, I know this is a very tricky situation because I know people got trapped on their side, on mainland and some people got trapped in San Pedro. In discussions with the bigger group in the task force, we did say people who want to go to San Pedro, that's perhaps the easier situation, they should be allowed to go back, understanding that they need to go and self-isolate because they are going to an area that has had two cases. And how do you get the people who need to come off. We have been screening them on a daily basis, particularly people who have had health issues will need to come here and I think yesterday for example, there was 15 or 16 people that were allowed to come to Belize. We have also said that we may have to look at this on an individual basis because it seems that, up to a thousand people, some preliminary numbers are the ones who want to come out. Ideally you would want to keep everybody on the island for the next 7, 10 days because that's from when the index case was identified was 7 days ago. We need 14 more days to see how that is going to pawn out."