Office towers, malls and footpaths which are usually bustling with office workers are unusually quiet as a 'shadow lockdown' hits the Perth CBD with businesses bracing for an onslaught of COVID cases.
In the Perth CBD, businesses are battening down to prepare for what they anticipate will be a coronavirus storm, after watching what happened to Melbourne and Sydney over the summer.Shops and hospitality venues in the CBD have left staff goSo much so, you could be forgiven for thinking Perth was already in the middle of an emergency if you looked around the CBD on a weekday.
It's a similarly sparse scene in the shops and hospitality venues whose survival depends on office workers opening their wallets and whose owners have already had to sack staff this year.This kind of shadow lockdown is not what you would expect in a stateand is yet to open its border to the world. Many have split their workforces into remote teams and office teams to minimise the risk of everyone being absent through sickness or having to quarantine as a close contact.
"We identify that about 64 per cent of those professional services firms — so whether that's in real estate, ICT, finance, insurance, professional services, those sorts of businesses, which are the lifeblood of the local CBD retail activity — have moved to a model where much of their staff are working from home."
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