I was to make some practical suggestions to the Minister of Health and petition him and his Ministry under his leadership to consider two changes to the current Covid-19 policies to assist businesses and their employees.
Firstly, businesses are suffering with the method you have adopted in your policies of quarantine for members of the public and employees.
Therefore to ease the burden of your current Covid-19 protocols you should find a way to offer rapid tests within the public health care system.
The existing system of PCR-only testing is inadequate and is backed up for months causing much inconveniences and loss of manpower for businesses.
This has been placing an increased burden on businesses as they have to pay their employees that are home and quarantine for 20 days and more.
Businesses have to pay for their employees for being laid up at home which is a tremendous cost to them.
The businesses also have to pay for private PCR testing ‘out of pocket’ at private institutions as it takes forever to get results at the hospitals or through valid Ministry of Health testing sites.
This also causes major delays to find out if their other employees are exposed. The whole office may have to be quarantined if the whole workforce was exposed. Moreover, the delays are also preventing the timely notification of infections within the company causing great distress and quick response in getting their office space sanitised in a suitable time.
There needs to be a better system in place to deal with the length of time it takes a member of the public to know if they are Covid positive or not and rapid testing will do this.
Secondly, I suggest a shortened quarantine period to 14 days.
Twenty days are no longer the international standard. Omicron has a high rate of transmissibility that has already caused whole sections of our economy to be quarantined and is causing a further slump in the contracting economy.
Many cases are quarantined because they are a first contact and haven’t gotten back the test results from the PCR test.
Not because they are themselves infected. The number of people quarantined in the business sector is causing more problems, economic fallout and low productivity
These simple changes would assist the business owners and the families that depend on their jobs to ease the burden on them and increase productivity throughout the country. Your systems implemented do not work and are affecting businesses and people’s lives.
They are just not doing what is required to properly staff the hospitals and the personnel with the equipment they require and are just telling you and all citizens to quarantine forever.
This has an adverse effect on businesses especially now. A typical situation is a business owner may have a member of staff who is quarantined for 20 days without even testing. He is issued with a standard to go into quarantine. The person now never gets back the PCR test from the public healthcare just has to stay in quarantine until the expiration of his period.
So the employee is stuck out for 20 days for no good reason as the quarantine order is never revoked. Although the employee now has a negative test result.
This is what is going on in reality.
(Neil Gosine is an insurance executive, the North East Regional Coordinator of the United National Congress and a former chairman of NP. The comments and opinions expressed by him in this column are not necessarily those of AZPNews.com, a division of Complete Image Limited.)
Two Suggestions for Minister of Health
I was to make some practical suggestions to the Minister of Health and petition him and his Ministry under his leadership to consider two changes to the current Covid-19 policies to assist businesses and their employees.
Firstly, businesses are suffering with the method you have adopted in your policies of quarantine for members of the public and employees.
Therefore to ease the burden of your current Covid-19 protocols you should find a way to offer rapid tests within the public health care system.
The existing system of PCR-only testing is inadequate and is backed up for months causing much inconveniences and loss of manpower for businesses.
This has been placing an increased burden on businesses as they have to pay their employees that are home and quarantine for 20 days and more.
Businesses have to pay for their employees for being laid up at home which is a tremendous cost to them.
The businesses also have to pay for private PCR testing ‘out of pocket’ at private institutions as it takes forever to get results at the hospitals or through valid Ministry of Health testing sites.
This also causes major delays to find out if their other employees are exposed. The whole office may have to be quarantined if the whole workforce was exposed. Moreover, the delays are also preventing the timely notification of infections within the company causing great distress and quick response in getting their office space sanitised in a suitable time.
There needs to be a better system in place to deal with the length of time it takes a member of the public to know if they are Covid positive or not and rapid testing will do this.
Secondly, I suggest a shortened quarantine period to 14 days.
Twenty days are no longer the international standard. Omicron has a high rate of transmissibility that has already caused whole sections of our economy to be quarantined and is causing a further slump in the contracting economy.
Many cases are quarantined because they are a first contact and haven’t gotten back the test results from the PCR test.
Not because they are themselves infected. The number of people quarantined in the business sector is causing more problems, economic fallout and low productivity
These simple changes would assist the business owners and the families that depend on their jobs to ease the burden on them and increase productivity throughout the country. Your systems implemented do not work and are affecting businesses and people’s lives.
They are just not doing what is required to properly staff the hospitals and the personnel with the equipment they require and are just telling you and all citizens to quarantine forever.
This has an adverse effect on businesses especially now. A typical situation is a business owner may have a member of staff who is quarantined for 20 days without even testing. He is issued with a standard to go into quarantine. The person now never gets back the PCR test from the public healthcare just has to stay in quarantine until the expiration of his period.
So the employee is stuck out for 20 days for no good reason as the quarantine order is never revoked. Although the employee now has a negative test result.
This is what is going on in reality.
(Neil Gosine is an insurance executive, the North East Regional Coordinator of the United National Congress and a former chairman of NP. The comments and opinions expressed by him in this column are not necessarily those of AZPNews.com, a division of Complete Image Limited.)