If we had Leaders...

The current global pandemic has revealed many truths about the structures and norms governing humanity. This has led to the following aspirational charter, signed by leaders representing 80% of the world’s population, 80% of its financial assets and 80% of its weapon power.

The pandemic has demonstrated the scale of the challenge represented by global heating, and the need for radical solutions implemented quickly under a global remit.

It has also demonstrated the bankruptcy of all current systems of government. The nation state as a dominant unit is revealed as too small a unit for some critical challenges and too large a unit for others. An acceptable set of human rights would be universally achievable within one generation were nation states not to inhibit progress. All human beings should have an adequate nutritious basic diet, affordable basic health care, housing which is secure, heated and not overcrowded and lifetime education.

Specifically, the prevalent western model is susceptible to capture by special interests, inadequate provision for many citizens and breakdown of civic responsibility. The Chinese model systematically oppresses minorities and hoards information and power within an elite. The Russian and African models have yet more glaring defects, starting with endemic corruption. While all current models are bankrupt, ample good practices exist to turbocharge human progress.

The signatories of this charter believe positive drivers for human progress include science, open debate, inclusivity, freedom of expression, property rights, justice, globalisation, trade, competition, technology and automation. Apart from unhealthy competition between nations, two other related factors have undermined human progress. The first factor is the reliance on an out dated employment model. The second is the level of return on capital demanded by unrestrained markets. Correcting these two flaws also requires global agreement.

Humans in developed nations (and within a generation, developing ones too) no longer need to toil for an employer, at least for so many hours per week or years per lifetime. Currently this false assumption dominates corporate practices and welfare policies, squeezing out progress, for example via automation, and limiting the civic potential of citizens. The 6% real return on capital squeezes competition and labour and encourages greed, dishonesty and risk. 

To successfully redirect global resources to this new paradigm requires accepting one further fact. War and its threat are uniquely destructive and almost never an appropriate response to disputes. Weapons should be progressively pooled between nations and gradually eliminated.

Taken together, these aspirations and acceptance of drivers and inhibitors of progress lead us to a series of commitments. The current crisis demands urgency and creates opportunities. Budgets must be redrawn, new revenue sources discovered, new employment models introduced, and renewed communities envisaged.

Firstly, all so-called defence expenditure will would pooled and wound down. National procurement budgets will be reduced by 25% per annum, and 50% of all new assets will be surrendered to international bodies. Personnel and maintenance budgets will be reduced by 10% per annum, and 20% of assets per annum will be surrendered to international bodies.

Secondly, a global carbon tax will be introduced, with 50% of the proceeds pooled globally. Part of the global proceeds will be used to fund renewable infrastructure and decommission existing carbon intensive infrastructure.

Thirdly, a global “Tobin” tax on financial transactions will be introduced, all pooled into a global fund. The goals of the fund will be to achieve the human rights, with a bias towards developing nations, but also to reduce corruption and avoidance. Most fiscal matters will remain national or local concerns, but international harmonisation agreements will eliminate loopholes and devices.

Fourthly, nations and localities are committed to phase in funded Reimbursement For Care (RFC) , as a positive refinement to Universal Basic Income. Reimbursable care includes childcare and elderly or disabled care, and need be policed only lightly. A typical adult will be expected to claim 30 hours per week, and this should be sufficient to fund a minimal lifestyle with all human rights, subsidised where required. Those without family members to care for should support other civic needs such as nursing homes.

Citizens can choose to enhance their incomes via paid employment, investment or entrepreneurship. Sales tax will be eliminated on essentials but increased for discretionary purchases. With this overall monetary regime and appropriate competition-promoting regulation, it is anticipated that corporations can aim for a return of around 3% real or more if GDP growth is higher. Some transitional payments will be required, for example for underfunded pensions.

Fifthly and finally, we will make decisive steps towards the goal of universal freedom of human movement within a generation. This will require phased introduction, and be accompanied by transfer payments between nations and obligations loans for those moving between nations.

These steps will require most nations to both pool sovereignty and to devolve responsibilities downwards. Existing international bodies will require new charters, and new bodies must be created. Governance structures should be equitable based on population and financial contributions, and be set up in ways that are easily adapted over time.

Within nations, the bulk of implementation will lie within communities, since the administration of RFC and associated initiatives should be at a local level. Localities will have discretion as to how to specialise, though a share of funds will also be pooled so that that budgets can be higher for communities of greater historical deprivation. Cities will be supported via national and global funds to accelerate development in required needs such as automated mass transit, provision of affordable housing and repurposing of retail and office spaces towards specialised senior accommodation and to arts and leisure.

Implementation of all these actions will be aggressive, with tracking of targets, but also phased and rapid adaptability based on learning. The elements of the program are self-reinforcing, and failure in one area will jeopardise other target, so transparent program management at all governmental levels will be critical.

As humanity, we have a unique opportunity to effect a step change in human welfare. We can end war, ensure a survival planet, ensure efficient and equitable financial structures, end fixed employment and implement free movement, all within one generation.

Watch those Prices soar

The other day, while standing for two hours in line outside my local Trader Joe’s supermarket, I was reminded of a business trip to Moscow in 1993..

I’d just started one of my favourite jobs with Shell, as retail advisor for central and eastern Europe. I had a big say in deciding which of the newly liberated countries Shell should build petrol stations in, when and how. The job had everything: one huge benefit was that we could attract the very best talent, some of the smartest people I ever worked with. But the best part of all was being one of the first Brits to see the wonders of Prague and Budapest and the other great capitals.

During the trip to Moscow, a frighteningly lawless place at the time, everybody was persuading me to approve a retail business there. Retail would be the flagship for the new entity there, and even the bosses in London wanted the legacy of Shell stations in Moscow. To bolster their case they drove me around the city to see the stations already there, pitifully few, mostly dilapidated, and all with long lines of cars outside waiting to be served.

Back in the office, some rare inspiration enabled me to make a very perceptive remark. Ah, I said, I did see a lot of cars on the way in. But I prefer to count them on their way out. All the sycophants thought I had made a joke and laughed, but I was not joking. Yes, there was massive pent up demand in Moscow. But the real issue were supply bottlenecks. Most of stations only had one pump open, and often ran out of stock even so. On the way in there was indeed a flood, but on the way out a mere trickle. And the income derives from those making their way out. The supply bottlenecks came from the only refinery and the control of the mafia. Why did we as Shell think we could defeat those forces when obviously nobody else could? It was ten years before Shell opened a station in Moscow, and I believe lives as well as money was saved as a result.

Back to Trader Joe’s, we are all tempted to look at the lines, observe higher prices than we are used to, and accuse them of gouging. But look more carefully. The line is because they only allow fifty into the store at once, and various other costly social distancing stipulations. At the cashier and on the way out, there are fewer transactions than before the pandemic. They are not gouging; in fact they are suffering.

Further, fair play to Trader Joe’s, one of the other skills I picked up in my commercial career is to know a well-run store when I see one. Trader Joe’s on Metropolitan Avenue is a very well-run store.

As we emerge from the pandemic, all businesses will have to change. Demand will be sluggish, then surge, then settle, perhaps at a lower level than before because people have less money in their pockets and Amazon will have eaten all the cake. Supply will ramp up slowly, and fixed costs will be higher, at least until commercial rents collapse. What does all this mean for which businesses will survive and for prices?

When social distancing does not fundamentally altered supply, the new equilibrium might arise close to the old one. The sectors that will change the most are those where we all used to pack into tight spaces. Among others, these are restaurants, airplanes, theatres and events.

It is a gross simplification, but it is fair to argue that there are two types of restaurants that used to make money. You have the posh places with the brands and the cachet, where very few clients all pay a small fortune. And there are the places where each client offers only a small margin but the place turns over four sittings per night.

The first group might even thrive after the pandemic. They have plenty of space, and established brands and will have less competition: we won’t treat ourselves as often as earlier, but we’ll go up market when we do. The second group are in trouble, because the basis of the model, packing us through, can’t work when we need more separation. Many will go under. But some will succeed, and they will gravitate towards their posh peers: they will put up their prices. Because there will be less competition, we’ll pay anyway, as long as the quality is good.

We will have to get used a world where those luxuries that we enjoyed tightly packed with us will be less available, less frequent and much more expensive. It will feed inequality, because much of the poor will be completely priced out, and because those same poorer people are the ones who won’t get their jobs back as these sectors consolidate.

What can we do? Not much. Governments will soon realise that there are better things to do with our taxpayer dollars than propping up zombie restaurants. Arts and culture will have to rely even more on wealthy donors. The ugly oligopoly of airlines in the US will get even uglier.

We have one immediate recourse, if we want to keep our favourite local restaurant in business. Uber eats and Doordash are currently pulling the same parasitic trick on restaurants that Ticketmaster and Stubhub did to events. I do everything I can to boycott those bastards, always buying directly at the box office whenever I can. That is easy for restaurants, we can just order directly rather than through the middleman. Restaurants need our help, and that is something we can do.

We can also pause before we condemn Trader Joe’s and their ilk. Some are gouging for sure, and some of our local stores are treating their staff very badly. But we should understand that in many cases, despite appearances, their costs have gone up while their volume has gone down, so increasing prices is not an unreasonable reaction.

Next time you are standing in line at the supermarket, placing a direct order with your local restaurant, remember Moscow. Could the customers on the way out, not the way in.   

The Trend Accelerator

One way to think of the world after Coronavirus is to consider trends that were playing out before. In most cases, I believe the virus will accelerate the trend, because it reduces the forces that used to slow the trend down. Then, depending on whether the trend itself has the full support of society or whether it was just something society tolerated, we will either come out of this with the trend reinforced, or the trend itself will crash into a wall.

An easy example is retail, the way we shop. For years, online retail has been chipping away at bricks and mortar retail. There are solid reasons for that: why go out and queue to park and hack through people to find something that might be out of stock, when a few clicks does the trick. The trend was held back by a couple of factors. Consumers had to build trust in the new method, especially for items like groceries where they liked to observe and feel the goods. Some were slower adopters of anything digital. And the bricks and mortar retailers, despite weakening financial positions, tried anything to keep their loyal customers, via coupons and experiences and pleading to landlords and local authorities to save jobs.

All of this is blown away by Coronavirus. Slow adapters and sceptics have been forced online and like it, even if online providers have struggled to deliver their usual brilliant service. The financial resources offline are being destroyed weekly, and local authorities will also be broke and hardly prioritise keeping moribund institutions open. It is game over. Amazon has won, and the longer this goes on and the further it spreads into the developing world, the win will become global. Amazon would have won anyway, but now they will win more quickly.

Education is another area. The trend to online learning was slow before Coronavirus, held back by habits, poor childcare and entrenched teachers unions. But online learning is wonderful when used in the right places. It has limited use in elementary schools or arts courses, but our son is a civil engineering undergraduate and he has hardly blinked an eye, and nor have his professors. After the virus, courses like his will have a heavy remote component, because everybody wins that way. High schools will also take advantage and improve as a result, because some teachers will have been convinced and authorities will be desperate to save money too.

We might also see a wonderful side effect in the area of childcare provision. Dad’s stuck at home suddenly appreciate the importance of childcare, and those dads include bosses of firms. Those same firms will institute much more home working after the virus, another smart trend that previously had tradition holding it back. So who will look after the young kids? The bosses will finally vote for quality affordable provision by the state, and even insist carers (and teachers) are paid as fairer wage. Working hours and school hours will be better coordinated and staggered to make commutes easier. Scandinavia, here we come.

What about those commutes? This one is more complicated. The clear trend before the virus was towards Uber: more people are living in cities and avoiding the costs of private cars. The special factor here is public mass transit, which will be avoided by many for a while as unsafe. I have heard of people planning to buy cars after the virus precisely to avoid public transit. That will be sad, but some good things may come out of it in the end.

Perhaps the roads will be even more clogged because more people will want to drive. Toll pricing, another trend, will accelerate to dampen this and raise much needed cash. Uber will emerge stronger but will have to raise prices to cover cash shortfalls and maintain investors. So maybe there might be a breakthrough for unmanned vehicles: Uber will want it, authorities will want it and consumers will want it too, and the technology is not far away. We might even see the Holy Grail on this one, unmanned public mass transit, like mini personal taxi pods operating between hubs. That would be wonderful.

In health care, lower ranking staff will be more highly valued, forcing hospitals and the state to stump up higher wages, which may lead to elimination of waste: telemedicine is an obvious opportunity here, and society may also start to question investing thousands in expensive operations for folk in their nineties. In the US, there is sure to be clamour for a state provided health insurance, even if it may still be too early for Medicare for all.

It is likely that climate change might have greater public urgency after the virus, as people feel less invincible and strongman deniers are revealed for what they are. We will still be reluctant to pay, but the energy industry might bail us out. Few politicians will risk coal subsidies and Coronavirus may be Armageddon for oil (I personally hope not for their pension funds though). It will take a while because of the oil glut, but once the dearth of new investments clears that out the energy profile will change.

Gig work will only grow; one sad reason is that employers will be desperate to take back staff on more favourable terms to them, such as contractors. Total employment will also struggle to recover, because firms will bring forward automation and because of the weakness in labour intensive sectors like retail and hospitality. Inequality could get a lot worse, but perhaps governments will fear social unrest and take the chance for radical action. Perhaps the US will create a better safety net, and things like universal basic income may have their day. Might we even see shorter working weeks?

Then we have international trends. One trend before the virus was the collapse of cooperation between nations. So far we have seen no signs of any reversal of that trend, but optimists can hope that it might come, especially if this goes on a long time, a perhaps if there is a triumph of cooperation in finding a vaccine. At least this is one trend that shouldn’t accelerate, though the despots are doing what they can to blame foreigners and consolidate power.

Then we have China versus the USA, a relationship that has been turning ugly for several years but where China has been clearly winning. Again, it looks like the trend will accelerate. First in, first out is always the best option in these situations and China is in a strong position just now. The world will be less willing to toe the line of the US after the pandemic, because practicality will trump ideology, even if US credibility is not totally shot. But the anti-globalisation movement will win for a while at least, because nations will be nervous about fragile supply chains and dependence on others. Sadly, we might even see the acceleration of a bi-polar world, with a US-led and a China-led realm for many sectors. Don’t bet on the US-led one winning very often.

It gives me comfort to note that most of accelerated trends will help humanity, even if there will be losers and bumps in the roads. But the list screams another thought in my head. If we didn’t already think the 2020 presidential election was important, we certainly should now. Most of the good outcomes feel much more credible without the disinfector in chief in office. 

Preapre for the Ugly Phase

Coronavirus has been ugly enough already. Here in New York, we have 15,000 dead – we all know someone whose relative has died even if none of our own direct contacts has perished – yet. That story is being replicated around the globe.

Yet to me somehow this time has so far revealed the positive side of humanity more than the negative. True, we have the idiot in chief to make our blood boil daily, calculating when we think he deranged and deranged when we think he is calculating. True, there have been scammers, and reckless cowboys, and penny-pinching partisans and racist bigots. One lady interviewed for TV clearly thought her hair care was a human right, while other people’s health care was not.

The positive side of humanity has come through far more strongly. We have seen inspired leaders, generous philanthropists, ingenious scientists, assiduous journalists, courageous health care workers, endlessly adaptable parents, stoic shop workers and cleaners, brave patients, thoughtful neighbours and uplifting communities. Humanity delivers miracles every day, and we don’t need sightings of the Virgin Mary to prove it, we just have to keep our senses open.

My problem is that I fear for what is coming next. I predict that the balance will switch to the negative side of humanity. The positive will still be there: our hearts will be warmed by stories of miraculous recoveries and eventually by global scientific collaboration and brilliance, and a vaccine will eventually tame the beast some time in 2021.

But 2021 will feel a long time coming, and our frustrations will spill over long before then. Sitting on the couch for two months deprived of many pleasures is a manageable hardship for three months or so, especially when we remind ourselves how much tougher things are for some others. But once three months becomes six, during the stifling humidity of high summer when the city is almost unbearable in normal times, then nine, then twelve, our nerves will fray. We will stop enduring and start blaming.

Actually, I think the bigger issue will not be the continuing restrictions, but their relaxation. For it is one thing for us to be told that we are permitted to venture out, but quite another for us to be ready to do so, no matter how claustrophobic we feel at home.

Over the last few weeks, we have been led to believe that the world outside our front doors is a death trap. That has been necessary. In order to make everybody comply with the necessary precautions, we had to be cajoled into complying with many other marginally useful ones. We all took a week or more to fully embrace the restrictions, and it would have taken longer if the message had been more nuanced. Many people took far longer than a week and are still rather cavalier.

Some time soon, the message will change. People will be allowed to return to offices a few times per week under various conditions. We will be allowed back to restaurants and bars, as long as we sit far enough apart. Gyms and salons will open up, and after that other non-essential stores and businesses. We can’t stay as we are until the vaccine arrives, the balancing act between saving lives and saving livelihoods has to shift.

But will you be visiting the gym on the first day it opens? Why is something deemed reckless on one day suddenly safe the next day? The virus is not tamed. We might still die, without doing anything dumb. If we become infected, it is highly likely that most of the people we live with will be as well, including dad with his lung condition. The best that can be said is that the odds of catching the virus might be slightly less. Even that is doubtful. What might be more true is that, if we catch it, the odds of us passing it to lots of people who we don’t share a house with will be less, because of the testing and tracing. But that seems scant comfort, even if we believe it. And why should we believe it, when the president said that anybody who needed one could get a test at a time when nobody who wasn’t an NBA star could get one?

China has started opening up, and what has happened feels to me to be a good predictor of what will happen elsewhere. The restaurants are open but few are dining. The malls have reopened to silent corridors. It makes sense. It took us a week to learn how to behave to save our life. Surely it will take far longer to unlearn that?

If everybody was to take this journey in the same way at the same pace, it would be OK, the recovery would be slow but it would arrive in the end. But in reality we will all be making different trade offs, and that will create tensions between us. We will display more and more of the ugly side of humanity.

Imagine a company trying to reopen in New York, one with some small manufacturing, sales, distribution and administration. The company might or might not have received some government help, but it will still be cash poor and operationally compromised. It might have been able hurriedly to devise some safer processes and put up some screens, but it will essentially be making it up as it goes along. It will ask its staff to be part of that effort?

Many people will respond with ingenuity and humanity, but there will be conflicts as well. Some people will be in a hurry to get back to work, needing the money, while others will refuse, fearing illness. Who then gets paid? Who gets to decide? When does welfare get switched off? Can management insist, and fire those that refuse? What happens when it becomes obvious that management have designated safer conditions for themselves than their workers?

Everybody will be a part of this experiment, and everybody will have their own perspective and priorities, which will create conflicts everywhere. Already, I see vast differences when I go shopping and ride home with the heavy bags on the bus. The posher folk keep ludricrous distances from others and are wearing space suits, while the poorer people, probably still working themselves, make compromises to get on with their lives. On the affluent Q23, people won’t get on if there are more than two passengers already, but on the blue collar Q60 they fill most seats, because they have to get to work, and because at work the risks are far greater than anything on the Q60.

This will pit parent against child, husband against wife, manager against worker, worker against worker, white collar against blue collar, old against young, fit against fragile, rich against poor, business against government, government against government. The stakes are high, the rules are absent, the dimensions are vast, and the timescales are instant.

Here in the US, in the midst of all this we will have an election. Oh bliss! We all need to prepare for some ugliness in the months ahead. Hopefully we can still have our hearts warmed by the everyday stories of humanity’s kindness and ingenuity and all those other miracles. We will need them more and more as this continues. Let us pray for that vaccine, and avoid eating bleach in the meantime.

The Devil in the Denominator

At the start of my career, I was a retail sales rep. for Shell in Northern Ireland. I had to look after the Shell petrol stations in part of the province. It was a fun job.

One of the many lessons I took away from Belfast was that small businesses come in many shapes and sizes. I had a few big stations, usually on land owned by Shell, where there were several employees and even things like dedicated accountants and managers.

At the other extreme, I remember a station on a side road off a side road off a side road, operated by a charming old woman of eighty or more. My monthly sales report showed that she sold almost nothing, but she stayed open, running the place herself, alerted by a bell in her living room that was tripped if a rare customer would show up. There was no reason for her to close. She basically had no costs, and nor did we. So long as it remained safe for the Shell tanker to deliver fuel to her, the business made sense to us and it made sense to her. I called in for a social chat every six weeks or so – she always had great homemade cakes.

I often recalled this woman in later years when I was in fancy head offices devising strategies for whole countries. Senior managers always wanted key data to demonstrate that everybody understood the business that they were in charge of and to produce KPI’s that would drive strategy.

One time fairly early on I remember standing in a room with the head of the retail business for the whole UK, arguing over some set of statistics. There was much debate, because no indicator seemed stable. At one point, he shouted, exasperated, “how can we pretend to know what we are doing when we don’t even know how many sites we have?”

I immediately thought of my old lady up country in Northern Ireland. Was she still alive? Did she still sell fuel? And, even if she did, should her station actually count? The senior manager wanted to use statistics to understand his business, but every ratio seemed to involve something that he really shouldn’t care about. It shouldn’t matter to him whether my old lady was pumping gas or not, but it did, because if she stopped the national volume per site would increase.

Volume per site often became a key indicator in other contexts, with more being seen as better. I remember being told by some fancy consultant that Shell should make a bid for the Elf network, because it had the highest volume per site. The reality was that Elf had all its sites in big cities and on motorways, but that was also where price competition was fiercest and rents highest, so volume per site was only a partial guide.

There was usually a good reason to segment further. We could just look at Shell owned sites, because in those we bore most of the fixed costs and kept most of the revenue. We could exclude motorway stations because of the unique government fees they carried. But what about truckstops, with huge volumes but tiny margins? Supermarket sites? We even had some dual branded sites, for goodness sake.

I notice that most major retailers nowadays use an indicator of same store sales growth to report and analyse. I like it. It is not a ratio, but a comparison between two meaningful numbers. It strips out network changes. And it doesn’t really care about stores like that of my old lady; her volume would not influence the data much at all.

All of these thoughts of ratios and KPI’s has come to my mind recently in the context of coronavirus. Everybody is trying to publish meaningful statistics and trends, but most of them lead to more questions than answers. Usually, the reason is my old lady in Northern Ireland.

Start with the mortality rate of the disease. At the beginning this was one way the epidemiologists tried to convey the seriousness of covid 19: flu killed 0.1% of those infected, but this virus killed maybe 2%.

But the 2% figure has not really stood any exposure with reality. If you compare the ratio or deaths per cases across cities and countries, it is all over the place. Just now, in New York, we have 10,000 deaths and 100,000 confirmed cases, but nobody is claiming a mortality rate of 10%. In theory, it could be even worse, because death should be a lagging indicator.

It is obvious where the problem lies. The deaths number might be reasonably accurate, though even it has challenges, due to folk dying at home undiagnosed or dying with a range of possible causes. But the denominator, the number of cases, is even less reliable than Shell’s count of its stations.

New York has finally got its testing somewhat up to speed, but still hardly anybody is being tested. If you are an essential worker you have some chance of being tested, maybe even frequently. If you are actually admitted into hospital you will be tested. The rest of us have to sit at home and wonder. It is possible that my wife and I have both had ultra mild cases of covid, but we have no current way of knowing, and, perhaps at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter, unless there are some implications for immunity.

This problem might be called the long tail challenge or the devil in the denominator. Often, what it tells us is that we are measuring the wrong thing in the first place. For something like that, often the only way to get a good handle on infection rate would be random sampling. Even that would only work if fully recovered cases still showed up in some way. But in the end, maybe we just should not care.

As a mathematician, I have been trying to follow coronavirus statistics carefully. It has not been easy, and the dodgy denominators have not been the only reason. Perhaps reasonably, there has been some censoring going on, usually not for political reasons but to avoid spreading panic.

To his credit, Andrew Cuomo has been fairly open and fairly consistent with sharing data for New York State. Just like same store sales for a retailer, the trend of ICU admissions seems to work as a meaningful trend indicator, and the same for intubations and deaths as somewhat reliable lagging indicators.

But even these numbers are hard to compare across states and countries. Different places will have different policies for who gets admitted to hospital (do nursing homes with specialist equipment count?), and some will be more robust in their data collection. For emerging countries, even the death toll is likely to remain a colossal undercount. In the end, comparing the total death rate during the pandemic with the same time period last year will probably be the best indicator.

On balance, I think statistics help us in times like these. They can support public messaging, and eventually help our morale, once things start to head in a less horrific direction. I prefer the facts of Cuomo to the bluster of Trump: “we have sent out millions of masks”: “Nobody has told me about anybody unable to get a test”. We need data: timely, accurate, well-defined data.

The Economist, as ever, has been wonderful with its data and charts. They have been offering trend lines, with a log scale of cases or deaths plotted against the number of days since a place saw its tenth death or hundredth case: brilliant and enlightening.

But even The Economist has struggled with mortality rate, and recently it seems to have given up trying. I think that is a good move, as I remember the lessons from my old lady somewhere West of Ballymena. I remember her cakes, too.   

My main lesson so far from the crisis

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.

First Reflections on an Eerie Time

It is as if somebody pulled the emergency lever on every train. Life was chugging along, and then suddenly it lurched to a scrunching halt. The halt was separated by a few days in different places, and the brakes worked more quickly in some aspects of life than others, but the end result is much the same, a pause in life as we know it.

New York City is at the bleeding edge of the virus within the US, and we have suffered all of the usual bleeding edge problems. There has been lots of denial and chaos and U-turns as well as lots of courage and creativity and leadership. Overall, Cuomo and De Blasio seem to me to have done a good job so far.

The bizarre inconsistencies have been striking, most notably at supermarkets. We have been told for a while now to practice social distancing and to manage personal hygiene, and most of us achieve some of this some of the time. But at other times a more primal urge has overwhelmed all of this; we see some scary news on the TV, and we panic and rush to the supermarket to buy yet more toilet rolls and Lysol.

Twelve days ago I went to Costco to get a normal shopping list – so far we haven’t seen the need to panic buy anything. I was a little bit later than usual because I had a chat with my daughter in Dubai that took a bit longer than normal. But it was still a weekday morning, and usually at Costco that means a half empty store, short lines and getting in and out within fifteen minutes.

Not this day. Once I had finally secured a trolley by stalking somebody loading up their car, I made my way in, but 10% into the store the checkout lines started, snaking all the way around the store into rarely used nooks. Navigating around the store to shop became near gridlock. After ten minutes I decided to abandon ship, judging the checkout time to be perhaps two hours, so I navigated the gridlock in reverse to return my goods and get back to the entrance. By now, the entrance itself had been closed by staff to try to limit the chaos inside, only to create now chaos outside of people lining up to enter the store.

If only a few of us had the virus when we set out for Costco, probably most of us had it by the way we got home. But, once the primal shopping urge had been sated, we duly went back to our new careful routines, perhaps achieving tiny marginal reductions to the risks we had just spent hours recklessly maximising.

This is how the train stopped, in fits and starts, with missteps and waves of panic. It was probably all too late anyway, and once the criminal absence of testing is fully dealt with, we’ll discover just how much too late and just how extensively we allowed this to infect us.

At least by now, two weeks in, people having started behaving intelligently and our providers have implemented new protocols. This morning at Trader Joe’s we all lined up in the street six feet apart before a few at a time were allowed into the store.

But it strikes me how limited even a so-called lockdown really is. It is not just supermarkets and pharmacies that are open, but also banks, hardware, laundromats, pet stores, car repair, medical facilities, fast food and convenience stores and so much more, as well as all their supply chains and mass transit. It is justifiable, but hardly feels like a lock down. The only things really shut are the indulgent stores of malls. Still, the people have responded and traffic at most of the open establishments is way down, and the roads are clear of cars. Take away commuters, schools runs and everyday hustlers and roads empty very quickly. 

Our apartment suddenly feels to have shrunk to half its size, with three of us at home nearly all the time, seeking out our own niches to work and avoid disturbing each other. I have even set up a little desk area on the terrace, and hopefully soon it will be warm enough on most days to use it.

I have plenty of time to reflect. Firstly, it is a chance to be thankful for what we normally have but take for granted. On the Sunday before the emergency brakes were applied, I spent six glorious hour singing beautiful music with three different groups. The memory still lingers sweetly. After this blessing returns, it will be a long time before I complain about early call times or long homilies.

I have also come to appreciate the small routines that used to punctuate my day, such as trips to the old-folks home or the gym, or breaks to watch live sport. I find that I really need these punctuation marks, and have had to work to spread things out and to find new habits.

This time also offers opportunities to rediscover joys we might have forgotten to utilise in normal times. It is good to have more quality time as a family, and also to connect more regularly to wider family and friends. These connections somehow seem more valuable now.

Then there is nature. I have rediscovered the joy of long walks, and have found four great new ones within an hour’s drive from home, all to beautiful places that have not been at all crowded. How lucky that the mild and dry winter has left the paths largely clear of mud and has accelerated the lovely tree blossoms.

It will be interesting to see how trade-offs are handled around the world. For now, avoiding the overwhelming of hospitals has to be the dominant consideration. But before too long there will be arguments to restart more activity to support economies and livelihoods, and also from limits to social tolerance.

You already see hospitals in some places deciding who to treat and who to let die, and we have that ugly reality ahead in many more parts of the world. But essentially politicians, guided by society, will have to make exactly that trade off at a macro level. How many extra deaths is a fair trade off for retaining jobs, enabling education, and relieving social tensions? All medicine comes to this really, despite nobody being willing to talk about it openly: we could keep some 90-year-olds alive for a few more weeks by giving yet another expensive operation or drug, but there has to be some limit on the cost benefit. Such calls will come starkly into focus in the coming weeks.

It is early to predict long-term effects of this crisis. Probably, it will accelerate existing trends. Workers and educators will come to realise that quite a lot can be achieved remotely. For education, we are blessed to have a 20-year-old doing a technical subject; for him I suspect remote working can achieve as much as 80% of a campus approach. If we were elementary school parents, we would probably see that home schooling will struggle to achieve more than 20%, with our own sanity compromised to boot. Then there is e-commerce. This might be the deathblow for many of those shuttered malls, while Amazon will probably emerge even stronger.

Then we can wonder how this might change general attitudes or political priorities or the global balance. Some are already suggesting that this could be the Suez moment for the US, signalling the start of decline and being overtaken by China. We can hope that those people who live in their bubble might come to realise how interconnected we are and how counter-productive it is to have so many living so poorly, but I somehow doubt that. Similarly, climate change action will probably be put back on hold as soon as we are free to consume again.

But one benefit could come from a wider appreciation of live performance art and other ways humans connect. Being deprived of something is a sure way to highlight its value. Once employment practices change permanently and we all finally have more leisure, art will emerge as a fine purpose for humanity, and this crisis might just accelerate that trend a little. Lots of people will be at home at getting out their old guitar or their piano scores or paintbrushes. The potential blossoming of all that creativity is one vision to help us through these tough times.