Even with jubilation at the announcement of carnival 2022 in SVG, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves sounded a warning to the unvaccinated.
On Sunday 31st January, Gonsalves said if you are unvaccinated and planning to join the Kongo line, you would be wasting your time.
“If you have preliminaries for soca monarch, you will have persons coming to town from Fancy, Sandy Bay, Colonarie and Fitz Hughes coming down; some will not be vaccinated.
They are going to ride the same bus, and those who don’t get in will gather on the outside jamming up with each other.
I am talking about practical logistical issues because some will say I will get in somehow. So we have to do something to impress everybody on taking the vaccine to join the activity.
And if you come and you’re not vaccinated, you will be outside, and you will have to disperse; you would waste your money coming to town”.
Gonsalves said this is one of the challenges of a slim down version of the Carnival.
“With existing vaccination rates, it may cause more transmission because of the controls or lack of controls outside”.
Gonsalves said that by April, the government would say if the festival would be a significant event or a scale down version.
“To have a significant event, we will have to get the vaccination rates up to as much as 70 percent among the eligible population”.
We will have to use February and March to ramp up the numbers; I think we can do it”.
“I hope we have a full-fledge carnival, but I must first pass the hurdle, and that is to get the numbers up.”
St Vincent and the Grenadines have not hosted Carnival for the last two years due to the COVID -19 pandemic.
