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Don’t touch

Covid 19 has devastated the economy so perhaps in the interest of assisting in the mitigation of any similar reoccurrence, it might be prudent to consider minimising the the need to touch items to get them to function. This has been underway for quite some time where, for example, in heavily trafficked areas such as airports, faucets are electronically controlled. Maybe now is the time to regulate. I have been involved with design of licensed premises such as hotels and pubs for over 30 years. Budgets are often loosened for aesthetics and tightened for the functional side. Rarely would a design for automatic taps get client approval although it would do if they were mandatory. How daft is it to go to the expense of such items and then require a visitor to the toilets to pull a door handle to effect an exit?

it is good to see automatic operation of lighting becoming commonplace, probably due to building regulation requirements but I am sure that there are many other things that we could do to reduce the need to touch things to get them to work.

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0 Former Community Member over 3 years ago

and perhaps more to the point does society want to pay for all this improvement to save a small number of lives - I suspect we actually don't want the cost burden and a few thousand extra deaths a year is perfectly acceptable.

At the end of the day it's all about the cost - you could take a perceived shortage of face masks as an example - we could, at all times, maintain sheds full of PPE so it can be rolled out immediately when (or more likely if) required - but when CV19 is a memory, then you can bet a dollar on the fact that someone will question the billions being spent on preparedness when taxes are high and we can't deal with more immediate (eg education) - so, do people want more sure start nursery provision or a stack of duty gowns in a shed somewhere.

An example would perhaps be the peace dividend when we realized that the Third Shock Army wasn't going to roll down the Fulda Gap after all - so did we really need to be spending money on the problem (particularly on behalf of the French and Germans)

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OMS
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0 Former Community Member over 3 years ago

and perhaps more to the point does society want to pay for all this improvement to save a small number of lives - I suspect we actually don't want the cost burden and a few thousand extra deaths a year is perfectly acceptable.

At the end of the day it's all about the cost - you could take a perceived shortage of face masks as an example - we could, at all times, maintain sheds full of PPE so it can be rolled out immediately when (or more likely if) required - but when CV19 is a memory, then you can bet a dollar on the fact that someone will question the billions being spent on preparedness when taxes are high and we can't deal with more immediate (eg education) - so, do people want more sure start nursery provision or a stack of duty gowns in a shed somewhere.

An example would perhaps be the peace dividend when we realized that the Third Shock Army wasn't going to roll down the Fulda Gap after all - so did we really need to be spending money on the problem (particularly on behalf of the French and Germans)

Regards

OMS
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