Commuters began to gather at the imposing Oshodi traffic interchange as early as 5am Tuesday. Many appear to comply government directives to wear face coverings when out of home. The majority of the commuters are daily paid workers who must work daily to live. They have been locked up in their home for six weeks because of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown imposed by the government.
One, Ade Lateef, a bricklayer who lives in Agege is hoping he will be lucky at a large construction site on the island where he worked until the Coronavirus lockdown. “Everyday, I go there but they have not re-opened and now I have nothing to feed my wife and three children”, he told me, rushing towards a CMS bound commercial bus.
Ade, 55 is one of the two million or more workers n Africa’s most populous city who can now leave their homes since the restrictions were relaxed last week. But most offices and construction sites in the sprawling city have yet to open more than six days after they were told they could restart business.
As darkness gave way, hordes of mask wearing Lagosians begin to troop out of their homes as the continent’s largest economy hopes to restart economic activities crushed by stay at home orders forced by the coronavirus pandemic. The government has warned it will re-impose the lockdown if residents would not heed to social distancing regulations in this city of 20 million people.
In Europe and elsewhere, newly reopened cities, are emerging from lockdowns as authorities seek to achieve the delicate balance tween health concerns and the need for the people to eke out a living.
Nigeria and others face a delicate balance of trying to restart battered economies without fueling a second wave of coronavirus infections.
Social distancing has become the order of the day but just how to do that on the usually congested passenger buses in Lagos is the big question.
In Senegal, the government has also began easing those restrictions, with the people told they must now learn to live with the virus that has killed over 286,000 worldwide. Over a million of those who were infected globally, have now recovered according data from Johns Hopkins University.
The extensive railway network in India roared back to life Tuesday as the government there allowed people back outside. The train tickets were sold out in hours in Delhi and Mumbai. The Netherlands sent children back to school and Greece and Spain further eased restrictions.
In Paris, hairdressers practiced their new workflow over the weekend ahead of Monday’s reopening, and planned to charge a “participation fee” for the new disposable protective gear they’ll need for each customer. Walk-in customers will be a thing of the past, said Brigitte L’Hoste, manager of the “Hair de Beaute” salon, who expects the number of appointments to be cut in half.
“The face of beauty will change, meaning clients won’t come here to relax. Clients will come because they need ..”
Fears about new waves of infection have been born out in Germany, where a new cluster was linked to a slaughterhouse; in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus started; and in South Korea, where a single nightclub customer was linked to 85 new infections.
The South Korean government pushed back hard against that wave, halting the school re-openings that had been planned for this week and re-imposing restrictions on nightclubs and bars.
It is now trying to track 5,500 people who had visited a popular Seoul entertainment district by checking credit-card transactions, mobile-phone records and security camera footage.
In Africa, the danger inherent in restarting the economy was demonstrated in Ghana last week when a single coronavirus sufferer infected up to 500 workers at a plant.
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