With all that’s been happening lately, two activities reported on in Tuesday’s edition should not go unnoticed. The first was a workshop on communicable diseases for the hospitality industry.
People are becoming increasingly mobile and at the same time more health-conscious, which makes developing guidelines to adequately address the mounting challenges in this regard very important.
Recent experience with what appeared to be the so-called “Norovirus” at a major hotel on the Dutch side illustrated that.
In addition to hygiene standards for prevention, once an outbreak does occur there needs to be a collective, well-coordinated response from public- and private-sector stakeholders to mitigate its spread and minimise the damage to people as well as the tourism economy. Planning for those kinds of scenarios nowadays is actually a no-brainer.
The second story was about a course organised by the Chamber of Commerce in Operational Security Profiling. While the latter word has a bit of a negative connotation for obvious reasons, in this case it involves identifying potential criminals, including terrorists, in crowds.
To be clear, there is no known local terrorism risk or even any indication that “The Friendly Island” might ever be targeted in such attacks. However, considering recent events around the world and, for example, the suspect being sought by French authorities in Martinique, one really can’t be too careful.
What these educational events had in common is their focus on threats that may be different in nature, but both need to be taken seriously.
