News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Thurs. Feb. 18, 2021: A Caribbean country on Wednesday surpassed the grim milestone of 20,000 COVID-19 cases as the death toll reached 381.
Jamaica reached the daunting milestone of 20,016 cases, of which 6,696 are active cases. It now has the third highest number of COVID-19 cases in the Caribbean. Cuba is second with 40,765 cases and the Dominican Republic, which rolled out its vaccination campaign this week, has 231,737 and nearly 3,000 deaths.
Jamaica’s health minister, meanwhile, has denied speculation that Jamaica could be heading into another lockdown. Instead, Minister Dr. Christopher Tufton, says the country is gearing up for a vaccination plan.
Jamaica is expected to receive between 146,400 and 249,600 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccines through the COVAX facility later this month to vaccinate approximately 125,000 Jamaicans.
The government is also currently engaged in bilateral talks with other countries to receive additional supplies of vaccines.
The news comes as Tech Crunch reported that security lapse by Jamaican government contractor, Amber Group, has exposed immigration records and COVID-19 test results for hundreds of thousands of travellers who visited the island over the past year.
The same group also built JamCOVID19 website and app, which the government uses to publish daily coronavirus figures and allows residents to self-report their symptoms.
An Amazon cloud storage server storing the uploaded data was reportedly left unprotected and without a password and was publicly spilling out files onto the open web.
