With Christmas, the most lucrative season of the year for the business community, fast approaching, the decision by the government to waive the curfew restrictions until midnight has triggered an outburst of chatter from both the private sector and the public as a whole. Some commentators have pointed to the positive impact they feel the extended hours will have on the fortunes of the business sector. Others have expressed concern over what a senior public servant told this newspaper was tantamount to “tempting fate”.
The challenge that the government will doubtless face in some quarters is that of rolling back the restrictions at a time when the numbers are telling us that COVID-19 is still traveling at a gallop across the country. It is the fact that the new curfew hours appear to coincide with an increase in the number of deaths that created some measure of public apprehension following the announcement that the hours had been adjusted from last Monday.
On Monday, Stabroek Business spoke with four professionals in the medical field on the matter of the adjusted curfew hours. Each of them told roughly the same story: that whatever sacrifices have to be made in an effort to bring the infection and mortality rates down, then we simply have to live with those. Put differently, they are apprehensive about the relaxed curfew hours. Three out of the four made the point bluntly and they said, based on precedent, that the relaxation of the curfew hours was likely to metamorphose into further unofficial and arbitrary adjustments of the set hours by nocturnal revellers. “Some people have already reset their own curfew hours,” one of the three medical professionals said.
There is, frankly, much to be said of that view. There exists irrefutable proof that nocturnal entertainment activity in the capital, as well as in the rural communities, extends into the following day. Perhaps worse, there is equally pointed evidence in some communities that night-time police patrols have become indifferent to these transgressions.
It is the considered opinion in some quarters that the recent rolling back of the nocturnal entertainment/business hours might have resulted from the sustained lobbying of the government. Frankly, sections of the private sector, notably the entertainment industry, have sometimes mounted open and brazen push backs against official curfew protocols to the point where much of the rest of the society, including the forces of law and order, appears to have resigned themselves to an acceptance of that pattern. There can be no question that the weakness and equivocation on the part of the authorities and what sometimes appears to be a tacit official acceptance of the delinquencies in sections of the private sector have made the COVID-19 restrictions more difficult to manage.
In truth, and having regard to the steady increase in the number of COVID-19-related illnesses and deaths, one might have wished to see an input coming directly from the Minister/Ministry of Health on the wisdom (or lack thereof) in the relaxing of the curfew hours at this time. No such informed input appears to be forthcoming.
The most vocal support for the rolling back of the curfew hours will, understandably, emanate from the private sector, not least from the widely popular bars and restaurants, many of which have been chomping at the bit for a relaxation of the restrictive measures. These will, doubtless, applaud the additional business period during which they can trade without fear of sanction.
Christmas looms, and that, almost certainly, is part of the rationale behind the extension of trading hours. It allows for night-time shopping, an exercise that has been traditionally widely popular during the yuletide season.
Whether the adjustment of the curfew hours will be attended by stricter enforcement is unclear. What is clear, however, is that many observers will be keen to see whether relaxed restrictions will engender an enhanced sense of public responsibility.
