'50pc of eateries may be wiped out after reopening'.

Byline: Sheharyar Rizwan

The countrywide lockdown in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic has all but been officially lifted. From gyms and salons/barber shops to shopping malls and markets, almost every business has been allowed to reopen barring just a handful, including restaurants.

There is probably no business that did not take the hit during the two months or so of the lockdown. Similarly, restaurants, too, have incurred heavy losses; the industry employs thousands of workers who may go jobless if the current situation persists for long, and there is a lot of uncertainty whether this very essential part of social life will ever be the same again.

To get a slightly clearer picture, the Lahore Restaurants Association met Punjab Food Minister Aleem Khan on May 18, apprised him of their plight and suggested SOPs they could take while resuming operations.

Mr Mahmood Akbar, chairman of the association, told Dawn that during the lockdown they were constantly taking up the issue of reopening of restaurants with the authorities. 'We wrote to the chief minister, the prime minister. I personally wrote to the PM too and asked him to kindly look after us because we're in a bad shape, people may go jobless.'

The minister's response was apparently quite encouraging, or so claims Mr Raza Ahmad, another member of the association who attended the meeting. 'As an association, we weren't expecting gyms to open and not restaurants. But when they did, we had huge pressure on us. This meeting was the first formal conversation with someone from the government and was quite fruitful; the minister was very receptive. We presented some SOPs we could follow and all of them were accepted, but with slight modifications. We haven't received the final SOPs they'd like us to adopt.'

Following the meeting, the restaurants owners are quite positive their dine-in sections would be allowed to open up after Eid holidays, but considering the circumstances the world is in right now, it's no surprise they will have to follow certain SOPs for coronavirus. A copy of the ones the association presented to the minister is available with Dawn according to which the eateries agree to operate with 50 per cent of their total seating capacity, observe social distancing while customers wait to be seated, outdoor seating to be expanded, one table be limited to one family, high contact touch points to be sanitised regularly, customers to be presented with sanitisers at entrance, restrooms...

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