No more shutting down businesses - that's what the Guam Hotel and Restaurant Association wants and they say they've got the plan to do it. That plan - Ta Homlu' I Isla - or Heal the island - was presented to the GHRA membership today.

"The plan really is two pillars," GHRA President Mary Rhodes said. "Health and safety education with training as I mentioned with GVB and UOG in introducing a Guam safe certified program that introduces standards and uses best practices so that we conduct training for businesses so that they can improve on their protocols and really fill any gaps that they may have that they've identified as we've been dealing with covid and so that risk assessment And containment management is conducting a risk assessment and looking at your pandemic plans, your contact tracing protocols, engineering and administrative controls, workplace modifications, cleaning disinfection protocols and reopening and closure plans. A lot of businesses have been focusing on reopening plans only with public health and so we need to look at how do you communicate this to your employees? How do you deal with if you do have an outbreak and the how do you deal with closure and informing the public."


The plan is for finding asymptomatics in businesses and is HIPPA compliant. Rhodes said the group has met with the governor to seek out CARES act funding, which would greatly increase the program's effectiveness since all businesses cannot afford to self pay into it. GHRA has partnered with American medical center clinics and stateside based 360 clinics, which would streamline relevant data into one platform.

"There's different elements to this digital platform that will help create efficiencies really between public health and the employer groups especially when they come on-site and they need to do contact tracing," she said. 

Rhodes stressed the importance of the plan's full implementation as a way to keep businesses and also said Guam Visitors Bureau can look at it as a pilot program for the eventual reopening of the island's tourism industry.