BY Amr Emam
the presidential fiat for postponing mid-term exams for school pupils and university students until after February 26 can at least be described as “wise”. According to Minister of Education Tarek Shawqi, the aim is to reduce Covid-19 infections during January and February, which are expected to be peak infection months, which inevitable put pressure on the national health system. The pandemic continues to take its psychological toll on millions of people in this country as they hear of loved ones, neighbours and celebrities contracting the disease, and sometimes dying from it.
Against this background of fear, the importance of the last month’s cabinet decision to make facemasks mandatory on public transport, in the workplace and inside supermarkets and shopping malls is all the more obvious.
The firmness with which the decision is being enforced is long overdue. Egypt could have easily avoided this precarious state of affairs if the authorities had similarly stressed on preventive measures since Covid-19 first reached this country last February.
True, the government made facemasks compulsory on public transport and in government offices in June, but the decision was not taken seriously either by the authorities or the public. This was why some people continued to spread the disease, passing it on to others of whom lost their lives – 8,000 in fact, and counting unless preventive measures adopted by the cabinet are taken seriously.
Lives will still be lost if we keep paying attention to treatment, rather than to prevention. Our main concern now should not be to treat people of Covid-19, but to prevent them from contracting the disease. Such is the logic behind the new preventive measures and the presidential decree delaying the first term exams of the nation’s schools and universities.
Nevertheless, our prevention measures will come short of fulfilling their goals if we fail to make it easy for the public to comply with them.
Many of those caught not wearing facemasks on public transport or in the workplace will complain about the price of masks, even though they are far from unaffordable these days.
However, some people on limited incomes or not will find it difficult to buy the masks. This is why state authorities should adopt a free facemask for everybody policy.
Facemasks must be made available on the streets, at bus stops, at metro stations, at train stations, and inside the different institutions and companies to be distributed for free.
This should not be the job of the government alone, but of the private sector and financially capable Egyptians, too. A mechanism for distributing the facemasks on the streets is not hard.
Indeed, some investments will be needed, but however high these investments may be, they would be far lower than funding to treat the rising numbers of Covid-19 patients in hospital.
The facemask industry has been thriving on fear. The new obligatory preventive measures will make the industry prosper even more in the coming days.
Nevertheless, facemasks should not be made for profit by either the private or government enterprise. Rather, masks should be there for prevention and if we really want to prevent infections from rising and the contagion from spreading. Moreover, such a simple piece of personal protection equipment should be free of charge.
Therefore, there is absolutely no excuse for taking infection lightly or being unable to obtain a facemask.
Prevention will be much cheaper than treatment and a free facemask policy should be adopted at the national level. Our next war should not focus on treating those who contract Covid-19, but on preventing people from contracting the disease. The government spends huge amounts of money on the treatment of patients at 360 health ministry hospitals and dozens of ministry of higher education hospitals, some of which are wholly dedicated to isolation. Those capable financially also spend much on private healthcare. Nonetheless, we as a nation will pay far less if we focus on prevention in. So, let our new war be for eradicating Covid-19 by preventing people from falling victim to it by preventing infection.
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