The world has changed and our old ways must change as well.

Even though the number of cases of COVID-19 in Australia and New Zealand and many other countries have stabilised or slowed to a very low  number of cases,  the world and how we must see it has changed forever.

As an example,the handshake, for hundreds of years the recognised international way to greet people, particularly by males, is now a rapidly receding memory, replaced with elbow bumps or other techniques intended to ensure that we don’t touch others outside of our immediate families.

That we keep to the now ingrained 1.5m  separation rule is now the way  we must live our lives, at least until there is a vaccine. Considering that even after all this time there is still not a vaccine for SARs, is an indication of just how difficult it will be to both find an effective COVID-19 vaccine and get it out to the whole world at a price which makes it something we will all be able to have.

So we have to come to terms that this is now a world we share with this virus and it will strike any time it gets the chance and with no available cure, the only way we can do that sharing is to follow practices which are now a part of life.

In many ways we are now all like people who are allergic to gluten, there is no cure and we have to change our lives and continuously monitor what we do to ensure that it doesn’t happen to us.

Washing hands should not be anything new, we should all have been doing it whether in the food industry or not, but now it has been properly highlighted as the main method for stopping the spread of bacteria and other micro-organisms.

I was running some training in the last week and for the first time ever of running food safety training, did not have to spend much time on reminding the group about the importance of handwashing and the correct method to use.

The big change for us all is the distance we now need to constantly remind ourselves to stay away from each other, which is a hard thing for such a social creature to do.

With the media no longer having rolling 24 hour coverage of COVD-19 and  no reporting every day on the number of cases and deaths, you can see that people generally are slipping back to the ways BC (before COVID-19) and not staying apart or washing hands as much. You can now even find hand sanitiser in the supermarket!!!

A place I do work with has had the same bottle of hand sanitiser on a table for nearly three weeks. Back two months ago it was being emptied and replaced nearly every three days.

The owners and managers of food businesses have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that they walk the talk and be the example of what are now the requirements for us all in this new world, and to ensure that all their staff do so as well, especially as restrictions are lifted and we emerge into whatever our brave new world is going to look like.