I have been working as normal throughout this pandemic, delivering to every door and delivering every item as usual, following the new guidance on stepping back from the door. I'm glad other delivery companies seem to be following the same protocol.
However, the Royal Mail have not provided us posties with ANY hand sanitiser during this time. Our vans have not been cleaned at all in months. We have disposable gloves, but nobody is being forced to wear them, and most are not. Anyway, once gloves are contaminated, everything they touch will be too. We need a means of washing our hands. It's essential because Covid-19 lives on surfaces; it's not just transferred from in-person contact.
We are young, fit people, very likely to be asymptomatic. We move around all day, scratching our faces and moving hair out of our eyes, adjusting our glasses, touching post, breathing on post as we walk around, touching doorbells and gates and letterboxes, then we handle a surface with the accumulation of all of these germs, and post it right through your grandma's door, who mindlessly picks it up on the other side of the door and these germs transfer onto her hands, when she thinks she's safe inside.
The least the Royal Mail could do would be to provide us with hand sanitiser. They could also make sure as few of us get sick as possible by limiting our exposure to each other. At the moment we're driving around in vans in pairs, spending 2+ hours all together sorting post in the morning and touching surfaces and moving around all morning, then going out and making contact with every door in the land while handling items constantly and without hand washing facilities.
If you don't think I am being unreasonable, can you please apply pressure to Royal Mail through whatever means, to ensure they can find a supplier who can recognise their importance to the efforts to contain this virus. We are still entering sheltered housing and touching door handles. Only today, I had a sheltered housing manager complain that we were NOT going to resident's doors. She said we needed to do it because she was "working from home"!
If you can, another thing you can do is to put hand sanitiser on your door step for a delivery driver, doesn't have to be your postie. You can even try to secure it if you don't want it to be taken but if I know I have a decent supply, I'll want to clean my hands as often as possible when I'm out. At the moment I'm having to ration the frequency that I clean my hands, which is the opposite of what I should be doing in a pandemic!!
I've tried to bring this issue up elsewhere and I'm new to Mumsnet sorry. I just want this to gain as much visibility as possible and to try to make sure as many people as possible are protected as fast as possible. There's an entire day of delivery tomorrow and another potential day of contamination from posties into vulnerable people's homes.
Am I being unreasonable to refuse to deliver the post until proper hygiene and safety measures are implemented by the Royal Mail?