As everybody scrambles for medical equipment and all of us make our own interpretation of safe social distancing protocols, there have been several attempts to discover best practice in responding to the new coronavirus.
Even though times are frantic, there have been ample opportunities. As countries, South Korea, Singapore and especially Taiwan seem to take the accolades so far. Each has advantages. They all suffered from SARS fifteen years ago and put emergency response contingencies in place. The peoples, brought up in a compliant culture, also had memories of that crisis so did not argue when asked to change habits.
All three places have managed to flatten the curve to a greater extent than models would predict, or even to have suppressed the virus completely. Testing and tracing seems to have been crucial. Mass testing, starting with anybody travelling in but extending to anybody with even slight symptoms, led to early identification of cases, and there were sufficiently few of them to make it practical to identify everybody that had been in contact with and then to test those people as well.
We all like to bash Trump over Coronavirus and there is certainly plenty of opportunity to find fault, but it was the CDC who originally screwed up, when it declined to accept the international test on offer and then ran a flawed domestic program for an alternative. That lack of testing, still existing today, made the test and trace solution completely impossible in the US.
Further, what about Europe? They had the tests available to them, but they let the virus get too far out of control to allow the winning approach to work there either. That seems like political laziness and reckless macho decision making to me.
So both Europe and the US ended up scrambling to keep people apart as the only way to try to slow the virus down. Even the UK joined in once Boris had learned how many of his citizens might be killed while he built up his herd mentality.
But which measures should be applied where, and when? Everybody rushed to keep out foreigners, but schools were left open in some places and closed in others. The list of so-called essential businesses differs greatly between US states and within Europe. Actually, in the end, t has been the people that have started to make this work. In New York, bars and restaurants can offer delivery and take-out, but demand has dipped to nearly nothing anyway, so most have closed for the duration, taking people and staff off the streets.
Among the discussion of lessons, I draw a very clear lesson that I have not read about anywhere; it is a familiar one from business. Whatever steps leaders choose to take, it is vital to manage the transition, the introduction, the implementation of those steps. Otherwise the steps risk doing more harm than good, at least for a time.
I have three clear examples of failures. The first lies at the door of Mr. Trump. Having been in denial for weeks, and spooked by the free fall in his precious stock exchange, he felt he had to make a statesmanlike address to the nation. Seemingly at the last minute, with little consultation or thought for implementation, he came up with what he thought was an easy win – stop all plane traffic in and out. He duly announced this live on TV.
The lack of planning or care for implementation was obvious for all to see. A whole series of clarifications had to be issued by officials in the hours and days that followed. No, it did not include trade. Yes, Americans could return home. And yes, there would be intensive checking at the airports and quarantine periods to follow.
Initially the stock market assumed he meant to include trade, and the sell off accelerated as a result, rough justice for Trump. Then, there came a mad rush to get the last flights back, but nobody had thought to prepare the airports, leading to lines of crowded arrival terminals stretching for hours. If only a small number had the virus when they boarded the plane to return, a lot more would have it when they escaped their arrival airport, and some of those would evade quarantine or at least spread the virus within their own families.
My second example is even more crass. Narendra Modi, having done nothing for weeks,, felt a similar statesman urge come upon him, and he literally ordered everybody home in one swoop. No essential services, no opportunity to return to a home village, no provision for people living on the streets, nothing.
Once again, a series of clarifications and retractions followed, but the damage had been done. The panic buying unleashed in crowded places must have infected millions. Infected people rushed towards somewhere they might find a place to sit out the virus, often on foot, duly spreading the virus right around the country in one swoop.
Trump and Modi are easy targets, but my third example is closer to home, and applies to pretty well all local leaders, those people we have been praising like Andrew Cuomo here in New York. It concerns the introduction of restrictions, and their wholly predictable impact on grocery shopping. Of course there would be panic buying. And of course, the thousands of people crammed into a CostCo store would spread the virus liberally. I have witnessed strange contradictions. We won’t go within yards of each other in a park, but we were happy to take extreme risks for a few rolls of loo paper.
Of course by now it has sorted itself out. Once again the people have worked things out for themselves, and the grocery stores have got their act together, instituting one-in-one-out systems and safe checkouts and so on. But my guess is that if this had been thought of in advance, we would currently be flattening a much milder curve.
When Cuomo decided the steps were needed, the smart move would have been first to prepare with the groceries and pharmacies, working out safe protocols and allowing them to reconfigure stores and staff and supplies for a few days. It would not have been hard, and it would have saved lives.
It amazes me that this seemingly obvious lesson doesn’t seem to have been widely transferred yet. It is not too late. Other states and nations have the advantage of being weeks behind the bleeding edge, and I can only hope that they are getting help to avoid the same mistakes.
We can also use the same lesson to be smarter individually. Once a new measure comes out, we should pause, just for a few minutes, to consider carefully what it means and how we should implement it. I felt such a fool the day I wandered into the super-spreader called CostCo a couple of weeks ago, especially because it took me too long to beat a retreat. A bit of foresight would have lowered my risk profile greatly.
No doubt the poor hospitals have had similar messy learning curves, and in their case I can have more sympathy, because you can’t ask people to wait a couple of days before needing a respirator. Still, I am sure they could have done more to separate out the infectious; one smart thing that Cuomo did was to copy South Korea and get to drive-in testing locations early on.
We are still very early in this crisis, and there are many more lessons emerging. In some areas, such as the hunt for a vaccine, it is impressive to see how experts are getting things done, all over the world. In other areas we are doomed to be constrained by clueless leaders. But the lessons are not all high profile. You don’t need to be the epidemiological equivalent of a brain surgeon to work out that measured implementations save lives.
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