When it reopened Sunday, a shopping mall in Bangkok’s Prawet district was ready with an innovative solution to COVID-19 risk: foot-operated elevator buttons.
To welcome customers for the first time in over a month, the Season Square department store posted photos of its new safety measures that include adding a pedal system on each floor and inside the elevators, so they would not have to share finger schmutz with each other.
Virus Hacks: Thailand going to great lengths to keep distant
The innovation has been widely hailed.
“I’d give it 10 points for creativity,” Facebook user Toshi Ryori wrote.
“People who always use their feet to turn on and off the fans love this thing,” Chonpakorn Pruetnirund wrote.
Other measures the mall imposed are providing hand sanitizers at several locations throughout, separating dining tables in the food court at least two meters, and limiting shopping time to two hours.
The mall also requires customers to scan a QR code linked to the government’s just-launched Thailand Wins tracking app to log their arrival and departure. The application was launched on Friday by the COVID-19 task force which hopes to track people’s movements – solely for public health purposes, they said.
Earlier on in the months-long crisis, people came up other creative ideas to avoid touching lift buttons, from poking them with disposable toothpicks and cotton swabs to even devising a brighter system by connecting a safety pin to a lighter, so after pressing the buttons, they could torch the virus in flame.
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