The Online Drivers Union of Ghana, an association of drivers for ride-hailing apps such as Uber, Bolt and Yango, is calling for the provision of disinfectants and others to help protect the lives of their members in the wake of the spread of the deadly Coronavirus.
Currently, all the six (6) persons who have tested positive for the Coronavirus in Ghana, imported the virus into the country, a situation the Online Drivers Union of Ghana says puts them at risk as they regularly find themselves picking people up from the airport.
The Public Relations Officer of the Online Drivers Union of Ghana, Torgbo Dziedzorm Wise, in a Citi Business News threatened a halt in their services if the app managers do not take steps to protect drivers.
“We have no idea where this sickness is going to end, so we want the company we are working with, Uber, to provide the drivers in these hard times with some high quality disinfectants. We should have the ones we can spray in the car every few hours because we learnt that the virus can stay on living material for 6 to 12 hours so we want them to provide that. Also we want education and information dissemination for both drivers and riders to be frequent, to be done almost every morning. If not we are trying to put a halt, a total stop to driving on the road for the next one month and we’ll force our drivers to stop.”
Torgbo Dziedzorm Wise called on Uber to be proactive.
“So if we don’t hear from them soon, we will put a stop to the work this week, it will not go past this week. We pick people from the airport every day and they are on masks, expensive masks, very sophisticated masks, and we are on just GHC 2:00 masks, which does nothing to us, so they should provide us with very sophisticated disinfectants and very sophisticated masks, for us to be protected from this virus because we are getting in contact with the people who may be crrying the virus.”
Meannwhile, the local management of the world’s leading ride-hailing app, Uber, has denied reports that it has suspended operations in Ghana following the threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic.
This follows the circulation of messages on social media which sought to create the impression that the services of the company had been suspended as a result of the cases of the deadly Coronavirus confirmed in the country.
The Country Manager of Uber Ghana, Jessica Poku, in a statement copied to Citi Business News, assured riders that the app is operating without any challenges.
She however mentioned that Uber is working to distribute disinfectants to drivers across the country, as part of several measures to protect drivers and riders as well as the general public from the disease.