I’ve not written an article for a while as I thought the last thing people need now is yet another opinion on the pandemic, but I thought a different perspective may be helpful for people involved in business planning in the time of COVID-19.
Whilst working with a wide range of businesses all trying their best to manage the pandemic effectively, I’ve noticed two different approached emerging. Some businesses are dealing with the challenges as if it’s a ‘crisis’ – reducing restaurant seating capacity to 50%, closing operations, temporarily laying off staff, postponing work involving travel. The basis of their thinking is that it will end soon, and everything will get back to normal – so they make temporary adjustments that push their businesses into a loss-making situation and try to manage cash flows with loans to avoid bankruptcy. Some Governments seem to be taking the same approach, closing borders, allowing public debt and unemployment to rise to record levels and hoping it will all blow over before the next election/coup.
Other businesses are assuming that this really is the ‘new normal’ and adjusting business models to suit a changing world, and while an increasing number of businesses seem to be in this camp, very few Governments are taking this approach.
So who’s right?
Well firstly we need to filter the avalanche of information by understanding the vested interests.
Medical professionals – often seen as the most reliable source of advice, but in a pandemic they only have one aim; reducing the pressure on hospitals whatever the economic impacts. Hospitals get overwhelmed each time there’s a flu epidemic, so they are right to be concerned, but it’s not unique to COVID.
WHO – desperately trying to make up for their poor start and the release of incorrect information (will be contained within China, death rate of 3.5% etc, etc) and so needing to reassure their donors, they send out endless warnings and vague advice.
News Media – in the past we consumed the news they fed us in newspapers that we bought every day, but with the move to internet media we now choose what we read, and so their revenues are based on clicks and advertising – so the news outlets need to feed us what they believe we want to read – and unfortunately we like to read about doom, gloom and the end of the world.
Politicians – in democracies they always have one eye on the next election, so they do what they think people expect them to do, not what is right. So if people are scared (by the news media) they respond to the fear and not the facts. In non-democratic countries the situation is similar, as dictators still need to keep most of the people happy to avoid a revolution.
Vaccine Companies – boastful press releases about the latest developments in COVID-19 vaccine technology help to boost shares prices – it’s a form of insider dealing. It’s obvious there will not be a vaccine in general use this year, and it’s not clear if it will be effective, and anyway in the history of mankind only one human disease has been eradicated by vaccination, and that took 200 years, so the Vaccine corporation’s press releases with a pinch of genetically engineered salt.
Public Health Experts – the one group who may actually know what they are talking about have no voice.
So how long will it last?
The real question should be; why would it go away?
The two previous novel Coronavirus pandemics from the 1960’s and 1970’s are still with us – they are one of the causes of the common cold. The different Influenza varieties circulate regularly, taking it in turns to cause global pandemics. SARS and MERS seemed to fade out, but they were much more serious diseases so tend to self-limit.
COVID-19 will just become another cause of seasonal epidemics, with reservoirs of infection in the developing world’s mega-cities such as Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Mumbai, Manilla, Dhaka, Lagos, Tehran. Individual countries will get it under control for a while, but then through international travel it will flare up again, just like seasonal influenza. We can’t live in isolation, and we don’t even try when faced with risks from diseases like flu or TB, which result in similar numbers of deaths to COVID-19.
When you filter out the vested interest noise, the fact is that COVID-19 is not a unique threat, and it is no more serious than many others causes of death. Obviously, any early death from a disease is a tragedy, but when the news media is saying that we’ve reached X million cases and Y thousand deaths – do people really understand the significance of the figures? Tuberculosis, a disease with an effective vaccine, kills around 1.5 million people every year, heart diseases from largely preventable lifestyle issues kills many more, but we don’t respond to these threats by closing borders or adopting unsustainable business practices.
In addition, with logarithmic population growth (even during the ‘COVID-Apocalypse’ the human population is continuing to increase), and with international air travel due to resume, there will be increasing threats from pandemics, so we need adapt to a world where regular pandemics are a way of life. Managing the COVID threat as if it’s a short-term crisis is being short-sighted. COVID-19 is not going away any time soon, and COVOD-21 may be on the way, so we need to view the COVID pandemic as a catalyst for change, and plan for the new reality rather than for a fictional world where the vaccine companies ride in on a white horse to save mankind.
What does this mean in practice?
Ask yourself; “Are our COVID-19 measures sustainable in the long term?”. If your answer is “No” then you have a problem. Identify all unsustainable measures and plan a way to replace them with business-friendly alternatives. You clearly need to continue to protect your staff and customers, politicians are never going to admit that they over-reacted, and the general public is going to need more time to realize that COVID was not the Zombie Apocalypse, so you need to continue to implement practical public health controls to both protect people and to meet customer expectations, but those measures need to be managed in a business-sustainable way. There’s also a need to review your offers and re-engineer for the new-normal
Some examples:
- Use screens to get seating capacities back to viable levels
- Consider high capacity extract ventilation to reduce transmission risks
- Make working from a home a permanent option and make flexible working hours the norm to enable people to travel at off-peak times
- Design premises to make sanitizing simple, use materials that self-sanitize
- Provide branded masks as part of the uniform – find the best materials to enable people to breathe easily and wear them all day
- In high noise environments such as meat plants, warehouses – use Bluetooth headsets to enable communication without removing masks and shouting
- Provide worker accommodation that has individual sanitary facilities and adequate ventilation
From the Government’s perspective, what if rather than paying millions of people to not work and funding ineffective ‘stimulus packages’, they invest in more hospital capacity, improved standards of accommodation for migrant workers, clean water supply and separate sanitary facilities for all citizens? Making businesses and countries ‘pandemic-resilient’ should be the aim now, as the time for crisis management has passed.