Ordinarily, “Donald Trump” and “right” should never occur in the same sentence but the man who has been described as “a low-IQ racist sex pest” was right about how some restaurant waiters are not helping in the war against COVID-19.
Appearing in what Americans call a “town hall” earlier this month, Trump said that a lot of people don’t want to wear masks.
“Who are those people?” the host asked him.
“I’ll tell you who those people are — waiters,” Trump replied. “They come over and they serve you, and they have a mask. And I saw it the other day where they were serving me, and they’re playing with the mask…I’m not blaming them…I’m just saying what happens. They’re playing with the mask, so the mask is over, and they’re touching it, and then they’re touching the plate. That can’t be good.”
Trump is never going to be able to identify Botswana on a world map but he could well have been describing what is happening right here at home, especially in Gaborone. To be clear, there are waiters who fully comply with the mask-wearing law but not all do. Even as COVID-19 cases continue to rise, the sight of waiters wearing mask as chin-warmers is a quite common one at Gaborone restaurants. The explanation that some give is that their voices would otherwise be muffled if they spoke to customers wearing masks in the legally prescribed manner. That may well be the case but in terms of the Emergency Powers (COVID-19) (Amendment) (No.4) Regulations 2020, those who feel they have valid reason to not wear a mask as stipulated should apply for legal exemption. These waiters have not done so.
Culprit-waiters will wear their masks the proper way when customers remonstrate with them but relapse when they are back at the wait station – where they also don’t observe social distancing and chat loudly among themselves. In some restaurants, the problem extends to chefs – who, in some cases, work in kitchens where there isn’t outdoor air filtering in. The latter means that these chefs can theoretically expel more potentially contaminated droplets.
The transmission risk at restaurants occur at various levels: waiters come into contact with a lot of people at the restaurant itself and in nearby shops where they periodically go to to buy supplies; they handle food that passes through a lot of hands in the kitchen and on the floor as well as tablecloths, menus, salt shakers, credit cards, cash, chairs, doorknobs, and scores of other objects associated with the restaurant.
There is also a deeply worrisome labour practice that Sunday Standard has written way before the outbreak of COVID-19 – the use of waiters as sanitation workers by some restaurants.
In one respect, the latter is partly a result of waiters working without a contract of employment that stipulates duties. That has led to waiting staff taking on extra duties that include heavy cleaning of toilets. The task of cleaning such toilets falls to waiting staff who would have temporarily left the floor and have food orders pending. Thereafter, such waiters go to the kitchen to collect and deliver the orders, in some instances, with the thumb fatefully pressed onto the plate surface, a few centimetres away from a dramatically-styled stack of salad. The COVID-19 situation has not altered the situation because some restaurants still use waiters as toilet cleaners.
While eating out is increasingly becoming popular among Batswana, establishments that are making a killing from this development have not fully modernised their food hygiene and safety standards. Typically and despite what they would be inclined to publicly hustle, restaurants don’t have a personal hygiene programme that provides the workforce with the necessary training on disease control and cleanliness. Keeping workers who are sick or have open wounds as far away from a food-handling environment as possible is the ideal but the reality is the exact opposite. The public health code prescribes that kitchen staff should wear chef hats and hairnets but both compliance and enforcement are very low. Despite the fact that baseball caps don’t properly contain a worker’s hair, they have become part of a chef’s uniform. In some jurisdictions, more stringent food safety standards prohibit open-toed shoes, false nails, nail polish, false eyelashes and any other object that may possibly contaminate food. Handwashing facilities are supposed to include hands-free sinks and a means to dry hands. Taking advantage of a loosely regulated industry, some restaurant owners also cut corners by having waiting staff double as cooks. By law, kitchen staff undergo a battery of thorough medical tests on a periodic basis and those who fail are not allowed to work until they test clean. In Botswana, however, it is not uncommon for waiting staff who have not been medically tested to fill in for kitchen staff, including chefs.
It all comes down to choice but the rising number of COVID-19 cases show that it is not yet time to take certain risks – like eating at restaurants. As a matter of fact, the United States’ director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Faucci, has mentioned restaurants among three places that people should avoid until the pandemic is brought under control. Granted, he was talking about the US but what is happening in some Botswana restaurants is more than sufficient evidence that some restaurants still pose a serious COVID risk.
Life getting back to normal means keeping restaurants open but if the risk is worth taking, select a restaurant that is making an effort to keep customers safe by following the health guidelines recommended by the Presidential COVID-19 Taskforce. Restaurants that follow these guidelines deserve customers’ patronage; those that don’t could give customers a disease for which there is still no cure. Visual feedback of the first few seconds should be helpful in terms of deciding whether to patronise a restaurant or not: if staff is either not wearing masks or not wearing them the right way in plain view of the public, think about what compliance with health guidelines looks like in the back of the house.
