The risks of covid19 are well known at this point. While we all need to be sympathetic to the need for people to earn a livelihood, a living should not come at the expense of public health and worker safety. This should be a given.

I have seen some businesses who are doing quite well right now. While my sample size is certainly small and my observations subject to my own biases, it is easy to tell apart the businesses who make an effort and the ones who do not.

We should support businesses who 1) require masks without fail, 2) offer masks and gloves to both workers and customers, 3) limit the number of customers in the store at any given time and 4) build plexiglass shields to separate customers and workers.

We should not support businesses who take a lax approach to masks, do not offer masks to customers who don’t have them, allow large numbers of people in the store proportional to size and do not have plexiglass shields in front of the register.

All of these modifications are easy and cheap to implement. There are few occasions where there is any valid excuse for not doing all of them in normal retail and food service industries.

Which bring me to the the point of this post. How can customers know how seriously businesses are taking covid19? Certainly, online review sites like Yelp or Google are going to be helpful, but these do not provide any indication of progress that businesses might make (“evolution”) or provide standards so that we can easily compare one business with another.

Many municipalities provide public record of compliance with health regulations. The New York City Health Department performs unannounced inspections of all restaurants in the five boroughs at least once an year and makes the data public. The public can search for any food provider in the city for any type of violation and even has a grading system. The Washtenaw County Health Department and the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development conduct regular inspections of food service establishments within their jurisdictions and publish the results online. The worst offenders often make the papers.

We need such a system for all businesses to make sure that they comply with efforts to contain the spread of covid19. Consumers have a right to know whether a business is compliant or not BEFORE they make the decision to visit that business. While the logistics of such a system are complicated and likely expensive, they are necessary.

Will this be on our legislature’s agenda? Do local health departments already have the authority to implement such a system? Would businesses push back against cheap masks and plexi? Certainly, there are challenges to implementation, but it isn’t impossible.