Tonight, reports reaching 7News are that another illegal border jumper has been detected - but in Belize City. This time it was a Mexican woman who has family ties in both Belize and her native country. The Ministry of Health is now conducting contact tracing, to determine the level of risk she poses to the Belizean public and the potential spread of the coronavirus.
At around 8:30 this morning, a team of police officers and members of the Health Ministry's Coronavirus Investigative Unit conducted a search at a home located at #46 Mahogany Street in Belize City. They were acting on information received. Present at the time of the search was a 45-year-old man, and 25-year-old Angela Soto, a Mexican Domestic of La Union Village in Mexico. Nothing incriminating was found, but after the authorities spoke with Soto, they learned that she arrived in Belize illegally via the Blue Creek/La union crossing. That was about a week and a half ago, and she told the authorities that she regularly goes to visit her father in Blue Creek, who works on a farm in that village.
This evening, during the Ask the Experts Webcast, the Director of Health Services briefly discuss this case, persistent border jumping, and its continued threat to the country's public health:
Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services
"From the Ministry of Health's standpoint, the key concern remains and that was voiced to the oversight committee yesterday and that is the issue with border jumpers and those people you may be aware as a community that are coming across and are not being captured by the system. Because the border jumpers are just people that you do catch. As is, we were notified of a couple in Belize City who was across the border last week. We are following that process closely and that is where the concern has got to be. For communities that are close to border entry points west, north and south I think that is where the concern really has to be because those situations can provide us with a potential jump in the number of cases."
As a border jumper, she was immediately taken in for coronavirus testing.
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