MORE than or perhaps just as much as the government, the business sector has a big stake in helping ensure public health in this season of the A (H1N1) flu.
If the state fulfills its duty to care for its citizens by ensuring healthy families for a healthy nation, the capitalists, on the other hand, rely on a productive—and, therefore, indispensably healthy—work force to grow the business. It is, therefore, reassuring to learn that besides the schools and state agencies, business groups, notably in retail, have joined the campaign to stem the spread of the A (H1N1) virus in the country, in hopes of keeping it where it is now: a low incidence of two cases in a sea of daily travelers from other infected countries.
The malls deserve kudos for joining the campaign by adding more hand sanitizers in their premises, and other related tools for hygiene, like soap and tissue paper. The management of SM malls has even moved to improve air quality and ventilation within their premises, considering how the flu virus thrives and spreads.
But a big part of the responsibility rests on businesses that run big work- places. With their captive audience of workers, they are in the best position to educate labor on ways to take good care of themselves—for their own welfare and their families’, as well as for the sake of the companies they work for. It’s no joke to have a big part of your operations shut down temporarily by a forced quarantine of workers once one or two are found to have been infected by the deadly virus. The best way to avert that costly scenario is prevention, for which no sane businessman should scrimp. If they need to hold seminars for their people, or spend more to improve toilets, eating areas and other places where workers congregate, so be it. If they need to let one or two workers suspected of being hit by the virus go on forced leave, so be it. The cost of having fewer people working for several days will be nothing compared with the cost of shutting down operations once these suspected carriers, forced to continue working, unwittingly spread the virus among so many others.
Meanwhile, the Department of Health’s move to revisit the strategy of relying so much on thermal scanners at ports of entry is crucial; one wonders why officials only realized now that, since the virus takes time to incubate and surface the overt symptoms like fever, a thermal scanner would not be able to track majority of the possibly infected persons. Still, health authorities have so far done a good job in putting in place a comprehensive program for fighting the A (H1N1) flu that relies not just on the state’s health network, but taps the entire bureaucracy, as well; and, more important, the private sector.
Perhaps the best vote of confidence in such competence thus far comes from the unlikeliest of quarters: on Tuesday, the Singapore Tourism Board, in tandem with Singapore Airlines, unveiled new initiatives to draw in more tourists from the Philippines, with tempting airfares and combo packages tapping hotels and tourist establishments in the city-state. Asked whether the country, which was among the first to be hard-hit by SARS, wasn’t worried about having Filipino visitors unwittingly bringing the virus to thus-far-swine-flu-free Singapore, the tourism board officials said no. Because all experts agree closing borders isn’t a wise idea; because Singapore itself, having learned crucial lessons from SARS, is doing a really good job at early detection and tracking of the thousands who visit it daily; and, finally, because Filipinos themselves have thus far conducted their own campaign well, with the two confirmed cases not having reached the level of a “community infection.”
Life, indeed, must go on, like love in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s time of cholera. Those who have made sure that can happen in the time of the A (H1N1) flu deserve appreciation for their efforts.