Make hoteliers pay

Friday 4th June, 2021

Overworked health workers, the police and the armed forces, tasked with pandemic control, have their work cut out for want of public coopration. Roads are full of vehicles despite travel restrictions and people continue to move about, exposing themselves as well as others to the danger of contracting Covid-19. This may explain why the ongoing lockdown so far has not yielded the intended result—a significant decrease in infections and the death rate.

Lockdowns, which entail huge social and economic costs, have to be coupled with stringent measures to ensure compliance if they are to be effective. A private institute that conducted a residential educational programme for 50 schoolchildren in violation of the anti-Covid-19 protocol, in Katugastota, Kandy, has been sealed and turned into a quarantine centre for the students for 14 days. The health authorities and the police have adopted the same method in dealing with some small hotels that accommodated guests in violation of quarantine laws. Such action is expected to have a deterrent effect, and the most effective way of handling the quarantine issue at a time when the state-run quarantine facilities are bursting at the seams. But the question is why big-time hoteliers are not dealt with in a similar manner.

Some artistes including a popular actress, arrested at Shangri-La Hotel, Colombo, recently, have been sent to a quarantine centre after being bailed out. Why should the government spend taxpayers’ money to quarantine them? They should have been quarantined at Shangri-La itself and the hotel should have been made to bear the cost. After all, that is what some suspects asked for while being bussed to a quarantine centre.

All hotels, guesthouses, etc., that violate the health regulations currently in place to ensure public safety, must be made to quarantine their guests at no cost to the state coffers.

Actress and ship

Governments in this country are lucky that issues crop up at such a rate that people cannot keep track of them. When the present administration found itself up the creek, having been exposed for the sugar tax racket, a shipment of contaminated coconut oil shipment came, and people’s attention was shifted from the billion-rupee scam to aflatoxin!

The Opposition and the media flogged the issue of carcinogenic coconut oil during the national New Year period, and when the government found itself in a spot again, a beauty queen was stripped of her crown, and this incident triggered a media feeding frenzy, which lasted for several days and the people forgot both the sugar tax scam and the contaminated oil racket. Then came the explosive spread of Covid-19, thanks to the government playing politics with pandemic control. Not even the ruling party spokesman adept at making lies sound like veracities could defend their masters, who ignored medical experts’ repeated calls for closing the country during the April festive season, when many super-spreader events took place with infections fanning out to all parts of the country. A distressed ship caught fire off the Colombo Port distracting the attention of the public from the pandemic. Then the government got into hot water for having permitted the vessel to reach Colombo. The police swooped on a birthday bash at Shangri-La and caused quite a sensation as an actress was among those taken into custody. Now, the social media and a section of the mainstream media are preoccupied with her caustic comments on the incident and her tirades against some journalists. The gutted ship is very likely to disappear completely before long, and another issue is bound to crop up when the public and the media lose interest in the cantankerous actress under quarantine.

Meanwhile, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin has drawn heavy flak for spending public funds to the tune of 850 euros a month on her family’s breakfast. She is facing investigations conducted by the police and tax authorities. She is said to have offered to pay back the money. The poor lady is in trouble because she became the ruler of the wrong country. Had she lived here and reached such a great height in politics, she would have been able not only to feed her brood at the expense of the state but also to stash away public funds to the tune of millions of dollars and deposit them in her children’s offshore accounts with impunity. As for her immediate problem, why can’t she organise a beauty pageant and get someone to grab the winner’s crown, or have a foul-mouthed actress arrested?