Chop, chop! Swiss barbers back in business
Barbers were doing a roaring trade among shaggy-haired customers on Monday as Switzerland started to ease restrictions imposed to control the coronavirus pandemic. The Swiss stopped short of full confinement in emergency measures introduced last month to combat the spread of COVID-19. But on Monday the country started the first of a three-stage lifting of the restrictions, requiring affected businesses to put in place protection plans for their customers and employees. Doctors’ surgeries, dentists, nursery schools, hairdressers and massage and beauty salons were permitted to reopen, along with hardware stores, garden centres and florists.
Wearing a fabric mask and a plastic face shield, Anita Ayma, boss at the Anita Coiffure salon in Geneva, was working through a 12hour string of bookings. Just inside the door, a homemade sign next to a dispenser bottle read: “Please disinfect your hands and put on a mask. Thank you.”
Bookings filling up
“I’m delighted that we’re starting up again. If we don’t work, things are dead,” she told AFP. Ayma said she was reliant on state financial support for businesses forced to close. Customer Sergey Ostrovsky said: “Super! I’m very happy!”, as he ran his hands through his newly-cropped hair. “A minute after I heard they were reopening, I booked an appointment,” the 44-year-old music professor said. A nearby Mod’s hair branch was doing brisk trade, with busy staff, the phone ringing constantly and pencilled-in bookings rapidly filling up the weeks ahead. “We’ve got work on,” said hairdresser Ines. “Clients were here as we opened.”
“We respect all the rules: two meters (six feet) between customers, disinfectant, we disinfect each chair after each client.” Every second chair in the salon was left empty to ensure physical distancing. In Lausanne, people queued in the street to get their hair cut — keeping two meters apart as they did so. Long queues were reported outside hardware stores around the country.
Florists’ new risk
More than 29,000 people in Switzerland have tested positive for coronavirus, while more than 1,300 have died in the landlocked European country of 8.5 million people. Schools and other shops can reopen on May 11, with the final lockdown measures scheduled to lift on June 8. The health ministry’s COVID-19 chief Daniel Koch said it would take two to three weeks to tell if infections were increasing following the first easing of restrictions.
In Geneva — which has the Alpine nation’s highest positive test rate, at more than one in 100 people — it wasn’t just hairdressers who were happy to return to work on Monday. Fragrant multi-colored bouquets of roses, hortensias and bellflowers were back outside Phillippe Wuillemin’s reopened florist’s shop. During the lockdown, Wuillemin Fleuristes took telephone bookings and did deliveries but the shop had to close. “All our contracts were cancelled. We had one person working out of seven. We were keeping up appearances,” said Wuillemin. “We’re pleased to be open again but now it’s a new challenge, a risk, because we don’t know if we’ll do any business. “It’s a perishable product. I can put out a choice of flowers, but are they going to sell?” he said, with most people still staying at home. However, customers have been popping in. “Plenty of people have come. They’re so happy because they have missed having flowers in the house.”—AFP