Health measures gain importance, may push operational expenses up by 20% for businesses

Experts say additional health and safety requirements of employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic will push up opex by at least 20 percent

Moneycontrol News

April 28, 2020 / 11:57 AM IST

Representative Image (REUTERS/Stephen Lam)

Commercial business parks are reportedly chalking out plans to ensure that health and safety measures are in place once operations resume post the coronavirus-led lockdown.

These endeavours may however hike operational expenditure (opex) as businesses look to work out long term social distancing, sanitisation, detection and prevention measures and commute routes, said a report by The Economic Times.

Experts said as per the report that additional health and safety requirements of employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic will push up opex by at least 20 percent.

Vinod Rohira, MD & CEO, Mindspace Business Parks noted that requirements such as security protocols, thermal scanners, and deep sanitisation could spike common area maintenance cost (CAM) costs by 20-25 percent.

Apart from increased hygiene measures, layout of cafeterias and break out zones would have to be redone to prevent close and large gatherings. New areas and better technology would also be required to better track people, it added. All this would add to costs.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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