Restaurants in Panama are in a “critical situation” that has forced them to close permanently to a thousand due to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite efforts to operate with home services during more than four months of quarantine.
Nationwide “around 20-25% of restaurants have closed, which would be easily 1,000,” the president of the Association of Restaurants and Related of Panama (ARAP), Domingo de Obaldia, told Efe.
Since mid-March, restaurants in Panama only serve the public to pick up or deliver to the home with the aim of avoiding crowds and stopping the spread of the virus, which has already made the country the most affected in Central America.
Restaurants were also one of the first sectors forced to close their doors to the public by the Panamanian government authorities.
This has caused the loss of 2,500 jobs, the suspension of almost 15,000 employees, and that they only operate with 20% of the payroll, a “really critical situation” and that “every day it worsens more,” said De Obaldía.
In a comparison with 2018, 1,600 restaurants had registered in Panama City that contributed 33 million dollars a month and “at the moment it is not even reaching four million dollars,” said the president of the association that groups 250 of the nearly 2,600 of these businesses in the country that generate about 39,000 direct jobs.
Although home delivery, known as delivery, can be a relief, it does not give guarantees. “This does not make restaurants money,” he added.
“It is in the real situation that we are experiencing as long as there is no definition by the Government regarding the opening guidelines,” said De Obaldía.
REQUEST TO ANTICIPATE OPENING
Under this situation, the union asked the Government chaired by Laurentino Cortizo to anticipate its opening for which they consider to be “100% prepared” after more than four months of pandemic and quarantine, one of the strictest in the region.
“We are requesting the government to move us to the third block (of the economic reopening) because if there is a sector that is 100% prepared in everything that has to do with health, we are the restaurants,” said the president of ARAP.
The government divided the gradual opening of the economy into six blocks, which began on May 13, and allowed two of them to be activated. However, the authorities linked the increasing escalation of COVID-19 cases with the start of economic activity, which to date remains frozen.
The opening of the restaurants is planned in block four, along with air transport and hotels. But the union asks to advance its start to block three, since according to De Obaldía “being a food industry” they are “highly regulated by the Ministry of Health”.
Thus, they are waiting for the “opening guides for restaurants” with the sanitary measures imposed by the Ministry of Health (Mine) to avoid the spread of COVID-19, such as the distance between tables, taking temperature or alcohol gel and cleaning shoes before entering the premises, among others.
Panama is experiencing an increase in cases, with records of more than a thousand newspapers, and deaths in recent weeks, which has led the authorities to re implement severe mobility measures in the most affected provinces with the aim of halting the spread of the virus, which it already has 1,209 deaths and 56,817 infections.
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