Dear Editor,
The recent actions of the Irfaan Ali administration have not gone unnoticed in light of the COVID-19 pandemic: the decision to end the rotation of public servants; encouraging citizens to meet in large numbers at events such as the Ministry of Housing and Water’s ‘Dream Realised, Housing outreach 2020’. We share the dire concerns of the public and public servants respectively as regards their resumption of fulltime work with the increase in COVID-19 infections and deaths, but without clear guidelines and coherent strategies being communicated consistently to stem the tide.
There seems to be a second wave of the pandemic world-wide, however with the paucity of credible data locally it is unclear whether we are on the crest of our first wave of infections, or are in the currents of the second. Additionally, we are left to ask if these acts by the Government, to end staff rotation, the public events themselves characterize and constitute super-spreader events. Again, we will have to await the data to determine the real-world, real-time consequences.
What seems even more certain is the apparent shift in government policy towards herd immunity which Time magazine’s Gavin Yamey says, “involves deliberately letting the novel coronavirus rip through the population…” and with a bit of the ‘survival of the fittest’ hopes. Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo articulated as much recently with his comments that the economy cannot stay closed forever, and that it is natural that people will die.
Surely the immediate concern has to be the Public Sector. Mark Barnes, J.D., LL.M., and Paul E. Sax, M.D., writing on the ‘Challenges of “Return to Work” in an Ongoing Pandemic’ in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest, “Because reduced density in facilities decreases transmission risk, employers [should explore] various methods of segmenting their workforces, both by timing of work presence and by encouraging continued remote work schedules. A strategy of staggering work shifts and allowing both very early and very late shifts reduces workplace density and allows employees and others to use mass transit at off-peak, less crowded hours, thus also reducing commuting risk.”
We have noted, at least in the case of the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, its transporting of staff will be discontinued.
The academics Barnes and Sax continued that, “Employers can also stratify their workforces according to necessity of on-site work for each employee and the employee’s membership in categories of workers for whom transmission risk is enhanced. Thus, for example, an employer might choose first to bring back those for whom workplace presence is job-essential; second, to bring back in stages those for whom remote working remains feasible; and third, to ask those who are of advanced age or have coexisting conditions to delay their return to the physical workplace until community spread has been greatly reduced.”
The government needs to rethink its approach and policy, bearing in mind that even with the most conservative of estimates a vaccine is some ways off.
Yours faithfully,
Sherod Avery Duncan, MP
