Expanding on the ‘ppe is a triage procedure’ point
Ive taken a few occupational health and safety courses, and in my province there is a mandatory Worker Health and Safety module from our Ministry of Labour that needs to be completed by every worker. One of the things that these teach is hazard reduction in the workplace and, surprise, a lot of the concepts are easily applied to hazard reduction literally anywhere.
Hazard reduction comes in multiple flavours: elimination, substitution, engineering, administrative, and PPE.
As we see on this useful graphic: these various methods of controlling hazards have different levels of effectiveness. Setting aside elimination and substitution as they can’t apply to the current topic, the most effective control is engineering, which is applying whatever infrastructure changes are necessary to keep people away from the hazard. This is the ‘government pays everyone to stay at home’ method. Following that is administrative controls, which I figure mandatory social distancing falls under, though only if its actually enforced. The least effective method of controlling a hazard is personal protective equipment.
Let’s do a quick metaphor: say you work in a factory which has recently been filled with bees. The bees came in the factory on their own and there are so many of them that working is almost impossible. Removing the bees will take a long time, but there are people working on that. In the meantime, your boss told you that you need to go back to work, and that you should wear a mask because there are bees. This situation ends with the factory getting sued for failure to ensure a safe workplace, and losing.
If the government refuses to do their due diligence in regards to the health and safety of their citizens, there should be consequences scaled large enough to ensure that it never happens again.
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