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As Covid-19 infection hotspots appear, the Government, on the advice of its medical experts, is clamping down tightly, but in an effort to keep the economy going at full tilt, is localising the intensified lockdowns to the areas surrounding the hotspots.

This will obviously help businesses not just to stay afloat but to continue growing since they, their workers and their customers, can continue with a near-normal business life although obviously having their social lives severely curtailed.

But for this system to work everyone has to be actively involved, including the business world. It is clear that the hotspots are a direct result of complacency and carelessness, as well as outright defiance. We all know by now that adherence to recommended and mandated measures do work. 

That is how we managed to restore much of the business world to full production and operations after the initial high-level lockdown and the enhanced national lockdown at the beginning of the year during the second wave.

Business, especially the retail sector, did suffer in both these enhanced lockdowns and if possible no one wants a repeat.

Largely it is up to everyone. But the business sectors can take a lead by enforcing the provisions of the “ordinary” lockdown for their staff and customers. The almost trivial extra expense in doing this pays huge dividends if it keeps the business open and keeps the customers coming in. 

The growing number of property owners who see the micro sector, a sort of formalised informal sector, as a permanent part of the business landscape have a special extra responsibility with the markets they have opened. 

If those markets are properly laid out, if the micro-businesses in the markets are properly regulated with simple rules enforced, and if customers go through the same sort of routines that they do when entering large businesses, then the odds become a lot higher that hotspots can be avoided and we just continue coping with the background noise of the pandemic.

To a large extent the present collection of hotspots pinpoint the dramatic rise in business in the smaller towns. Outside part of Bulawayo and the problem in Kwekwe, most of the hotspots are in that swathe of small towns across the tobacco belt with others in the more productive agricultural areas now also being hit.

This directly follows the success of the farming policies being pursued under the Second Republic. Farmers have tended, with some justification, to see themselves as largely immune from the Covid-19 pandemic, and that has tended to rub off on the residents and businesses of the small towns. Covid-19 is something people in Harare or Bulawayo have to worry about, along with other big-city troubles seems an all-too-common belief.

But the measures taken last year to decentralise tobacco marketing have brought crowds to places like Karoi, and just as important have produced groups of farmers with money to spend who obviously want to do some shopping.

In one sense this is a boon for everyone. But it does mean that the sort of risks people run when they shop in Harare are now being run when they shop in Karoi, and the same procedures, safeguards and other lockdown provisions need to be applied, rigorously. 

We also need to remember that the grain and cotton harvests are now also being brought in, so once again we have large groups of farmers in small towns and they and their families with money to spend at least window shopping.

The health dangers will intensify over the next couple of months as large groups of people, who have because of their on-farm isolation been largely at very low risk of infection, suddenly become at much higher risk. This places an onus not just on the health authorities but on business organisations and businesses to take the protocols seriously and help everyone to follow them.

A bit of customer education and awareness will help as well. And those businesses that do deliver goods in smaller centres need to think about just what their drivers might be doing and how they can be kept safe.

The Government is pressing ahead with accelerating vaccinations. There has been a bit of slowdown recently in admitting new groups to the programme, with available stocks of vaccine largely reserved for the second shots. But 500 000 doses are arriving this weekend and another 2 million doses are scheduled to arrive from next week, so the programme can now move into a far higher gear.

Priority is being given to those involved in the new economic activity, the tobacco business and presumably the staff of the grain and cotton depots. Those farmer markets are also on the priority vaccination list as are border towns. Since Zimbabwe is becoming ever more an island in a sea of more serious infection rates, the stress on the border posts and towns is required.

This includes the need for the general business sector to work out how to better protect their drivers on long-distance cross-border routes, and even how trucks coming into the Zimbabwean depots for loading and unloading are cleaned. 

Business organisations need to co-operate fully with these drives, and make sure their members are ready to move swiftly when they and their staff are called in. There is some reluctance in some quarters to get a vaccination, although this distrust is falling, but it still helps a lot when the boss is number one in the vaccination queue being jabbed in front of everyone else called in. And businesses in hot spots or in the riskier types of business should not be shy about pressing their case to have vaccinations as soon as possible.