Konk Life interviews Joe Walsh owner and proprietor of the Restaurant Bars Jack Flats Caroline’s and the Key West Waterfront Brewery
Konk Life: The City of Key West implementing restrictions to see rising Coronavirus in Monroe County, may impact on your three business. How do you think the City should be proceeding?
Joe Walsh: First, I think that looking for new ideas, it would be more helpful than rehashing old ones. If I’ve got a number of issues with the mask ordinance, or the series of mask ordinances, we follow the one early in the summer prior to doing much of homework on it or review or analysis on it. The city then passed another one in mid-September, which was emergency ordinance 20-14. And then about a week after that the governor issued an executive order prohibiting fine collection for individuals or shutting down businesses. So as far as we’re looking at it is unconstitutional for the city to be regulating those areas that the governor has, already precluded. And so, to me, there’s a certain level of pointlessness to this exercise. And if you’re ordering it and mandating it, and there is no enforcement mechanism, that is someone cannot be punished. If they’re walking down the street and not wearing a mask, then you’re just asking for trouble with from the police or the police department in the code enforcement. I think it’s unfair, I think it’s unwise. I think the city should be working on building our hearts and minds. And having a more hospitable approach if it believes that masks are the answer. I got an additional item though, as far as the masks go. In order in emergency ordinance 20-14, there’s a footnote on the bottom of page two. Where the city has its reasoning and why it believes mask ordinances are effective. And you can look it up on the website, but it’s community use of face masks and COVID-19 from the US Health Affairs number 39 magazine. And exhibit two of that study says that ordering employees to wear masks that his mask mandates for employees actually increases the spread of COVID 19. Now, I can say that again, because it’s pretty surprising that the city’s own study says that ordering employees to wear masks increases the spread. Now, from my own experience, if you’re asking somebody to wear a mask for eight hours, and they’re inside and they’re outside, their mask will get sweaty, they’ll breathe into it, they may cough into it, they may even sneeze into it. But the fake idea that you have some level of safety because of this mask, then increases the likelihood of spread. And there’s anecdotal data in the city as well that you have the city’s own offices that religiously wear masks infected each other while they’re at work.
Konk Life: The COVID response team at the White House says everyone to wear a mask. Is that correct?
Joe Walsh: Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to watch much coming from the White House. But the significant point of difference though, is twofold. The first one is a recommendation to wear one and a building consensus that if I’m walking down the street and wearing one and you’re passing me that you pull yours up just as common courtesy. This is I have no disagreement with this. I think it’s good. I’ve been doing it from the middle of March. However, the city’s ordinance is, unconstitutional. And article six of the US of the US Constitution says it’s the supremacy clause at the state has made a ruling the city can’t. So, you’re now have an ordered mandating people do something without an enforcement mechanism. The next piece of this is that stuff from the White House is not saying if you’re wearing a mask for eight hours working in an environment where you’re not allowed to take it off. And that is what the city’s ordinance says you’re not allowed to take your mask off if you’re at work, that I’ve never seen anyone suggest that that’s a good idea. To study aside for the guy says it’s not the study the city cited says it’s not right.
Konk Life: Bringing up new ideas that could expand the learning and education of this. Do you have any personal ideas about that yourself?
Joe Walsh: Yep. It needs to start with robots, wellness checks, and when people are showing up to work, and I would recommend that that’s being done by the person who is a manager, a general manager or director, the person who has the authority to be making judgment calls as to whether or not someone should be working or not. They also need to have some decent testing equipment, male thermometers, i.e., as a starting point, you need to quarantine all known or suspected contacts. This means from my company standpoint, we’ve had a dozen cases total from the beginning until now. If people will work for my company, we’ve had 60, who we have ordered, quarantined, some of whom have said it’s just allergies. To me, the most critical piece of this of controlling the spread of this disease is not allowing sick people to work. Then you have to perhaps change a company culture or a business culture to say, Hey, I really not feeling well today. And it needs to be okay for that person to take off, then the business like we are doing needs to pay those people so that there is not some sort of a perverse incentive for people to be coming to work when they’re just a little bit sick. So we have not had anybody who is completely asymptomatic, but we have had people who are saying they’re fine to come to work, it needs to be the business’s responsibility to then tell those people No, you can’t. And then it needs to be the business’s responsibility to pay those people. So when they don’t come to work. We worked with the Miami office of the Department of Business and regulation. And we developed a protocols for cleaning and disinfecting. So we using a combination of quaternary ammonia and hypochlorite. One during the shift because it is safe to consume and then one after we close so that the continuous cleaning of the premises after any guests come and go. And then we continue to use single use menus, reducing contacts. We also installed hand sanitizing stations all around the business. This is a critical piece. Because if you look at a number of people who are ordered to wear masks all day, if you take say the city’s police department or the city’s code, code enforcement officers, and they get sent out onto the street, in the availability of places for them to wash their hands. This doesn’t just go for the city. It goes for boys of all sorts. How do you wash your hands if you don’t have a readily available sink? And so you having a choir Hand Sanitizer is a bad substitute, but it’s a better option than then nothing. Then we’ve limited gatherings of our own employees. We’ve also installed the high efficiency filters and increased turnover in air circulation and OSHA regulations. 333990 has a number of good administrative and environmental regulations that I would encourage the city to be suggesting to for businesses to follow.
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