Well what I both feared and thought would be happening seems to be. The bvi by isolating itself like possible in other island nations, Australia for example, kept cases very low in comparison with countries where it was much harder to isolate. Unfortunately some of these countries including the bvi and Australia believed their success in isolating their countries mitigated the need for vaccination.

I saw a couple days ago there were 41 cases in the territory and yesterday that had risen to 91. Now I’m sure some of these were positives on people who had recovered or been exposed after vaccination and were not spreading the disease. Most of these were picked up on travel related tests. 15 of the cases seemed to be community spread. Most of cases are on Tortola.

https://bviplatinum.com/

I’ve watched the local media a good while and can see that their is a good deal of vaccination hesitancy. Only a third of the population has had one shot and a very high number of those are ex-pats. There has been and is plenty of vaccine available though I believe the expiration date is looming on many of the doses.

We came down the middle of June and were on a boat for a little more than a week and have been on virgin Gorda since. It does seem that they are trying to use mitigation techniques. There are mask mandates enforced in most businesses and there is hand sanitizer everywhere. Indeed it is much like it was in the states last winter. Masks were worn, but there as here they are primarily ill fitting surgery masks with more than half not covering noses. There is tremendous emphasis on hand sanitation. It reminds me of the very early days at home when there was intense emphasis on getting the virus from surfaces. Lysol and hand sanitizer were as rare as precious stones. Unfortunately it turned out that it was primarily airborne. So I think the effort is there but almost guaranteed not to do much at all in the face of significant virus around.

I hope that more decide to get the vaccine based on the increased numbers. I don’t know what the government will do if these numbers take off.

I’m a little concerned about exit testing timing. We had some friends with us the first couple weeks and it took them about 3 hrs at the Virgin Gorda clinic. I will attempt to get our information filled out and sent ahead as the very good advice here recommended, but I do worry that they will get very busy with their contract tracing and increase in numbers of tests to do in the lab.