Clean hands and face masks: what businesses can learn from Portugal

‘Every shop, bar, restaurant and pastelaria has a bottle of hand sanitiser at the entrance. You simply don’t get in without first cleaning your hands’

‘Guidelines for business state that face coverings are only “marginally beneficial” while mandating their use for doctors, nurses, carers, train and bus passengers’

Portugal is a country with much to be proud of. Its long decline from empire has hardly been smooth but its management of both the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic has marked it out as one of Europe’s most cohesive and resilient societies.

Flying there from Britain is something that Boris Johnson should request that one of his Cabinet do quickly. If the British high street is ever to open up again – and remain open – it urgently needs to see how airports, shops, bars and restaurants are successfully emerging from lockdown in Portugal. The differences are stark.

Flying from Luton to Lisbon, the first thing that strikes you is the lack of hazard tape and two-metre floor markings. Luton airport, like much of the rest of Britain, is both literally and metaphorically tangled with the stuff – but not Portugal.

There the emphasis is less on rules and more on understanding. In Lisbon airport, for instance, it is possible for a family of four to remain self-contained and sit in a row of four seats because the two in the middle have not been taped off. Where different households might come together, people simply know to leave an empty seat or two between them.

In place of miles of hazard tape, Portugal has invested heavily and much more wisely in hand sanitiser and face masks. The overriding principle guiding the lifting of lockdown here (as in much of southeast Asia) is that the transmission of droplets from one household to another should be avoided. From this, a series of simple but intuitive behaviours follow.

First, every shop, bar, restaurant and pastelaria has a bottle of hand sanitiser at the entrance. You simply don’t get in without first cleaning your hands. It takes only a moment, it’s refreshing and it is the oldest and most effective public health intervention in the book. Many bars and restaurants have a bottle not just at the door but on every table.

Then there are face masks. The etiquette here is that they should be worn, not outside, but whenever you enter a business or a crowded space. They are used not just by customers but also by workers, many of whom also wear face visors. They are, after all, dealing face-to-face with hundreds of strangers every day.

Wearing a mask might seem awkward but within five minutes it feels natural.

In a restaurant or bar, you enter wearing a mask but remove it while sitting down to eat or drink. If you get up to go to the loo you put it on again as a courtesy to those you pass on the way.

There are knock-on advantages to good hygiene. In supermarkets, for example, there are few queues to enter because the owners can be reasonably sure that everyone’s hands are clean and the bulk of droplets they exhale are being caught by their masks. Retailers seem happy for you to pick things up and even try things on for the same reason.

It is with these two simple – but almost universally adopted – measures that Portugal opened up its economy, after an early and successful lockdown, on June 1. It will be another week or so yet before any change in transmission starts to be reflected in its infection rates, but the omens and logic are good. As a fallback it has widespread testing available and a localised test-and-trace system in place.

Yet in Britain, the reverse is true. The Government is rightly desperate to restart the economy but appears to have failed to communicate the basics of good hygiene to small business.

I know of only two shops in my London neighbourhood where there is hand sanitiser at the door and only one in which the staff wear face masks. There are, of course, dozens where you have to queue to get in and where – like Luton airport – half the place is strewn with hazard tape, which does little but create unnecessary and unsanitary bottlenecks.

Could it be that the British Government’s hang-up with face masks might be the knot at the heart of our Covid hygiene tangle? By refusing to consistently mandate their use in enclosed spaces, is it inadvertently preventing British business from properly grasping how the virus is spread and taking the appropriate measures to contain it?

Think about it like this. Public Health England tells us the virus is held in droplets that emerge from our mouths and noses. They warn us to cover our faces if we cough or sneeze lest we spread them. They say we should stand two metres from someone we are talking to, to prevent droplets passing between us.

And yet the same organisation maintains throughout its “Covid secure” guidelines for business that face coverings are only “marginally beneficial”, while mandating their use for doctors, nurses, carers, hospital visitors and train and bus passengers.

For any communication campaign to work, it must contain a consistent logic, or at least not flatly contradict itself. Portugal has kept its rules and its messaging simple and logical – and it is working. We should do the same here before it is too late. Queuing outside in summer is one thing. In winter it will be impossible.