Colombia Preparing Coronavirus ‘Protocols’ to Enable Return to Work, Production: President

Colombia President Ivan Duque revealed April 13 that his government is now preparing certain regulatory “protocols” that will allow many people currently in Coronavirus quarantine to return to work, many businesses to reopen and the national economy to restart.

“We are preparing to beat the Coronavirus, rather than letting the Coronavirus beat us and destroy everything we have built,” according to President Duque.

“What does that mean? That companies, that services, that we in the provision of specific activities have protocols that allow us not only to have sufficient distance [between potentially infected people] but also sufficient measures in terms of biosafety,” he said.

To that end, the Ministry of Health is preparing a special regulation that will compile and explain biosafety protocols to confront the Covid-19 threat, “aimed at all sectors of economic, social and public administration activity in the country,” according to the President.

“We have to advance the protocols. For this reason, we will issue a decree where the competent authority to set all biosafety protocols to deal with Covid-19, in all sectors of economic, social and public administration activity, is the Ministry of Health,” he said.

Under such protocols, workers typically will need to wear masks, maintain certain separation distances, and “many will have to wear gloves [while] some will be able to work from home,” he said.

“The Coronavirus is going to be around for a long time, and so we have to be able to restore a lot of our productive life [in the meantime] so that our country doesn’t fail, and we have to do it with safety rules,” he said.

“There are places where there is a greater presence of the virus, and there are other places where there is a moderate presence of the virus. There are also places where there is no presence of the virus. We have to design the response capacities based on these territorial realities, obviously, working to maintain the greatest protection and the greatest [where-required] isolation,” he added.

As for mass transport sectors, “we have to design protocols, schedules, and schemes that allow people to use mass public transport, but do so without regret, do so with due distances, and with the [proper] protocols,” he said.