If you catch the bus early in the morning, well, you'll have to hold on to your tacos, johnny cakes, or whatever you're having for breakfast until after you get off. Starting Monday, a new bus policy will be implemented that will prevent passengers from eating or drinking anything except water.
The president of the Belize Bus Association explained that this is to help stop the spread of COVID. Since there isn't much social distancing on buses, this new protocol will ensure that passengers have on their masks at all times. He also told us - via phone - that the other operators are in agreement since buses are known COVID spreaders.
Voice of: Thomas Andy Shaw, President, BBA
"First of all, what we did, we reached out to our members and see if everybody would be onboard and the outcome was overwhelming, everybody was responsive and agreed to the measurements to avoid passengers eating on public transportation. Water will be excluded, if you want to drink water and if you had a child and you want to give them a bottle, that will be excluded. But to have passengers eating a tamales or peanuts - because more than likely you have to take off the mask to do so."
Reporter
"Do you feel that even with the less capacity, busses can only take like a certain amount of people and with the constant sanitization that these busses are still a main source of where the virus spreads, because of how close the passengers have to be."
Voice of: Thomas Andy Shaw, President, BBA
"That's a major concern and this is one of the reasons why we brought this up, because even at 75% everyone knows that you cannot social distance inside a bus and if you are going to social distance 6 feet apart then automatically the bus industry will come to halt, because you cannot run with 10-15 passengers. So you're not really socializing because people still sits beside each other. So what we were trying to do is to avoid the eating on board. If there is a passenger that wouldn't really want to abide then - we're looking at a daughter, a son, your father could be in there - this thing is about saving lives. It's just like the 1st October, if you don't have a vaccination card or a PCR test you won't be able to enter in public spaces, some people are negative towards it, buy you got to do what you got to do. If this is what we have to do to get out of it, then so let it be."
Reporter
"Do you think your operators will enforce that regulation that's coming in October 1st making sure that everybody has their test or vaccination card?"
Voice of: Thomas Andy Shaw, President, BBA
"We have communicated to all our operators across the board, some of them are a bit hesitant in really giving an answer to it. But I am positively sure with what is taking place right now they will make up their mind and try to enforce it."
