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The World After COVID-19
By Shlomo Maital
What happens after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides? Two McKinsey (global consulting company) experts Kevin Sneader and Shubham Singhal provide some insights. This blog is rather long – warning!
They describe a five-stage process we need to manage: In order: the five R’s — Resolve, Resilience, Return, Reimagine, Reform.
First point: Everything, everything will change.
“It is increasingly clear our era will be defined by a fundamental schism: the period before COVID-19 and the new normal that will emerge in the post-viral era: the “next normal.” In this unprecedented new reality, we will witness a dramatic restructuring of the economic and social order in which business and society have traditionally operated. And in the near future, we will see the beginning of discussion and debate about what the next normal could entail and how sharply its contours will diverge from those that previously shaped our lives. Collectively, these five stages represent the imperative of our time: the battle against COVID-19 is one that leaders today must win if we are to find an economically and socially viable path to the next normal.”
The authors then note a five-stage process for moving forward:
Step One. Resolve “ …a toxic combination of inaction and paralysis remains, stymying choices that must be made: lockdown or not; isolation or quarantine; shut down the factory now or wait for an order from above. That is why we have called this first stage Resolve: the need to determine the scale, pace, and depth of action required at the state and business levels. As one CEO told us: “I know what to do. I just need to decide whether those who need to act share my resolve to do so.”
Step Two. Resilience. “A McKinsey Global Institute analysis, based on multiple sources, indicates that the shock to our livelihoods from the economic impact of virus-suppression efforts could be the biggest in nearly a century. In Europe and the United States, this is likely to lead to a decline in economic activity in a single quarter that proves far greater than the loss of income experienced during the Great Depression. In the face of these challenges, resilience is a vital necessity. Near-term issues of cash management for liquidity and solvency are clearly paramount. But soon afterward, businesses will need to act on broader resilience plans as the shock begins to upturn established industry structures, resetting competitive positions forever. Much of the population will experience uncertainty and personal financial stress. Public-, private-, and social-sector leaders will need to make difficult “through cycle” decisions that balance economic and social sustainability, given that social cohesion is already under severe pressure from populism and other challenges that existed pre-coronavirus.”
Step Three. Return. “Returning businesses to operational health after a severe shutdown is extremely challenging, as China is finding even as it slowly returns to work. Most industries will need to reactivate their entire supply chain, even as the differential scale and timing of the impact of coronavirus mean that global supply chains face disruption in multiple geographies. The weakest point in the chain will determine the success or otherwise of a return to rehiring, training, and attaining previous levels of workforce productivity. Leaders must therefore reassess their entire business system and plan for contingent actions in order to return their business to effective production at pace and at scale. Government leaders may face an acutely painful “Sophie’s choice”: mitigating the resurgent risk to lives versus the risk to the population’s health that could follow another sharp economic pullback. Compounding the challenge, winter will bring renewed crisis for many countries. Without a vaccine or effective prophylactic treatment, a rapid return to a rising spread of the virus is a genuine threat. In such a situation, government leaders may face an acutely painful “Sophie’s choice”: mitigating the resurgent risk to lives versus the risk to the population’s health that could follow another sharp economic pullback. Return may therefore require using the hoped-for—but by no means certain—temporary virus “cease-fire” over the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months to expand testing and surveillance capabilities, health-system capacity, and vaccine and treatment development to deal with a second surge. See “Bubbles pop, downturns stop” for more.”
Step Four. Reimagination. “A shock of this scale will create a discontinuous shift in the preferences and expectations of individuals as citizens, as employees, and as consumers. These shifts and their impact on how we live, how we work, and how we use technology will emerge more clearly over the coming weeks and months. Institutions that reinvent themselves to make the most of better insight and foresight, as preferences evolve, will disproportionally succeed. Clearly, the online world of contactless commerce could be bolstered in ways that reshape consumer behavior forever. But other effects could prove even more significant as the pursuit of efficiency gives way to the requirement of resilience—the end of supply-chain globalization, for example, if production and sourcing move closer to the end user. The crisis will reveal not just vulnerabilities but opportunities to improve the performance of businesses. Leaders will need to reconsider which costs are truly fixed versus variable, as the shutting down of huge swaths of production sheds light on what is ultimately required versus nice to have. Decisions about how far to flex operations without loss of efficiency will likewise be informed by the experience of closing down much of global production. Opportunities to push the envelope of technology adoption will be accelerated by rapid learning about what it takes to drive productivity when labor is unavailable. The result: a stronger sense of what makes business more resilient to shocks, more productive, and better able to deliver to customers.
Step Five. Reform. “The world now has a much sharper definition of what constitutes a black-swan event. This shock will likely give way to a desire to restrict some factors that helped make the coronavirus a global challenge, rather than a local issue to be managed. Governments are likely to feel emboldened and supported by their citizens to take a more active role in shaping economic activity. Business leaders need to anticipate popularly supported changes to policies and regulations as society seeks to avoid, mitigate, and preempt a future health crisis of the kind we are experiencing today.
“In most economies, a healthcare system little changed since its creation post–World War II will need to determine how to meet such a rapid surge in patient volume, managing seamlessly across in-person and virtual care. Public-health approaches, in an interconnected and highly mobile world, must rethink the speed and global coordination with which they need to react. Policies on critical healthcare infrastructure, strategic reserves of key supplies, and contingency production facilities for critical medical equipment will all need to be addressed. Managers of the financial system and the economy, having learned from the economically induced failures of the last global financial crisis, must now contend with strengthening the system to withstand acute and global exogenous shocks, such as this pandemic’s impact. Educational institutions will need to consider modernizing to integrate classroom and distance learning. The list goes on.
“The aftermath of the pandemic will also provide an opportunity to learn from a plethora of social innovations and experiments, ranging from working from home to large-scale surveillance. With this will come an understanding of which innovations, if adopted permanently, might provide substantial uplift to economic and social welfare—and which would ultimately inhibit the broader betterment of society, even if helpful in halting or limiting the spread of the virus.”
Online Education Blog #3
Become Whom You Teach
By Shlomo Maital & Maya Taya Arie
Nietzsche once wrote, insightfully, “Become who you are”. I’d like to adapt that slightly: For online educators – Become whom you teach.
My granddaughter Maya asks: “Try to imagine that you are a student, what tools would you find most effective when learning virtually?”
Maya, that is a super question. Perhaps the most basic of all.
As a management educator, one of the hardest things I teach is to become customer-centric. I used to do an exercise with my managers: Please, stand up and speak about your product, as if you were a customer. Your product disappears, your business is broke. What do your customers miss most?
Sounds simple? But most managers had a very hard time, especially senior ones, who had not seen or heard a customer in years.
Same goes for us educators, especially at the college level. Take me, for instance. I’ve been teaching in college for well over 50 years. There are two generations between me and my students. Do I really understand them, their needs, their thinking, their preferences? And do I really try to?
Some 23 years ago, Harvard Business School Professor Dorothy Leonard, along with Jeffrey Rayport, wrote a fine article, “Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design”.* Her main point: You can ask customers what they want. Mostly they do not know. Or, you can observe them and empathize with them, BECOME them. And then when you are in their shoes and skin, figure out their needs.
So, Maya — Online education is triply quadruply hard, because I do not have students in front of me, face to face. But I do have them on screen, with ‘chat’… So, I can think hard, who ARE these people, what do they want and need, what interests them, what do they want to learn? NOT – what do I know and have to teach them? And how are they responding?
And I do know this – After years of teaching economics and crunching numbers, the most effective teaching tool is – stories. Stories! Real people, real events, real conflict, real decisions. So this will be the subject of our next blog – Teaching online, by the effective use of stories.
- Harvard Business Review, Nov.-Dec. 1997.
Getting Back to Work – But How?
By Shlomo Maital
Thomas Friedman
So far, this tiny virus, COVID-19, has caught us napping. We are all playing catch-up, making policy moves (like “shelter at home”) just a trifle too late, or a lot too late, as in unfortunate Italy. And we are making huge mistakes. Italy drafted its aging pensioner doctors and medical staff – the most vulnerable group of all – and many have sadly died. This should not have happened.
So, can we for a change think ahead a bit? With people at home, rather than at work – how can we get them back to work? Economists are pretty quiet these days (except, loud mouths, like Arthur Laffer or Larry Kudlow) but maybe we do have something sensible to contribute?
Tom Friedman, NYT Op-Ed coumnits, wisest of persons, says: “can we more surgically minimize the threat of this virus to those most vulnerable while we maximize the chances for as many Americans as possible to safely go back to work as soon as possible?” He has a solution, based on the experts with whom he consulted.
Economists crunch numbers. We have far too few good numbers on COVID-19. Dr. John Ioannides, Stanford U., mentioned by Friedman, writes:
“The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco. At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact. Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the pandemic dissipates — either on its own or because of these measures — short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable. How long, though, should measures like these be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm”.
And in a NYT Op-Ed, “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?”, Dr. David Katz, Yale University, writes that “as the work force is laid off en masse (our family has one adult child home for that reason already), and colleges close (we have another two young adults back home for this reason), young people of indeterminate infectious status are being sent home to huddle with their families nationwide. And because we lack widespread testing, they may be carrying the virus and transmitting it to their 50-something parents, and 70- or 80-something grandparents. If there are any clear guidelines for behavior within families — what I call “vertical interdiction” — I have not seen them”.
Katz asks, “When would it be safe to visit loved ones in nursing homes or hospitals? When once again might grandparents pick up their grandchildren?”
Here is his proposal: In short, focus on the most vulnerable, protect them – and get others back to work:
If we were to focus on the especially vulnerable, there would be resources to keep them at home, provide them with needed services and coronavirus testing, and direct our medical system to their early care. I would favor proactive rather than reactive testing in this group, and early use of the most promising anti-viral drugs. This cannot be done under current policies, as we spread our relatively few test kits across the expanse of a whole population, made all the more anxious because society has shut down. This focus on a much smaller portion of the population would allow most of society to return to life as usual and perhaps prevent vast segments of the economy from collapsing. Healthy children could return to school and healthy adults go back to their jobs. Theaters and restaurants could reopen, though we might be wise to avoid very large social gatherings like stadium sporting events and concerts. So long as we were protecting the truly vulnerable, a sense of calm could be restored to society. Just as important, society as a whole could develop natural herd immunity to the virus. The vast majority of people would develop mild coronavirus infections, while medical resources could focus on those who fell critically ill. Once the wider population had been exposed and, if infected, had recovered and gained natural immunity, the risk to the most vulnerable would fall dramatically. A pivot right now from trying to protect all people to focusing on the most vulnerable remains entirely plausible. With each passing day, however, it becomes more difficult. The path we are on may well lead to uncontained viral contagion and monumental collateral damage to our society and economy. A more surgical approach is what we need.”
Can we rethink our policies and strategy? Can we add some thought about economics to the public health/medical policy mix? Can we think ahead of the virus, instead of chasing it and falling behind? Can we truly think cost-benefit, systemically, holistically?
On-Line Learning
Maya Taya Arie & Shlomo Maital
My granddaughter Maya asks: Is there significance to using a white board or Power Point in an on-line presentation.
My (Shlomo) answer: Let’s assume that you, online learning facilitator, are using Zoom. There is a free version that is very useful. It is widely used. ZOOM has zoomed in value – and it is now a unicorn, with market value of its shares exceeding $1 billion. And they deserve it.
Zoom was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a lead engineer from Cisco Systems and its collaboration business unit WebEx.[1] Yuan graduated from the Stanford University executive program and was previously vice president of engineering at Cisco for collaboration software development. David Berman, from WebEx and Ring Central, became president in November 2015. The service started in January 2013 and by May 2013, it claimed one million participants.
If you can give a talk (note: try to keep it short!) without white board or Power Point – great! But generally there are data and facts and key points we need to put on the screen. Power Point can be used as a virtual white board – open it, and you can type on the slide as you speak…. Sometimes this is better than showing a pre-prepared slide, as it unfolds and evolves as the learner watches. (On Zoom: click on ‘share’ to open Power Point and share it with viewers).
If you have bandwidth problem (low capacity WiFi), you can just use “audio” on Zoom, and speak without video. This is not a bad option.
For Power Point: use 28 point or 32 point fonts. No smaller! Do not put too much stuff on the slide. Be ready to make your slides available to your viewers, if they request them by email.
Find ways to make your talk interactive, even if you have many viewers. There is a ‘chat’ button on Zoom. You can have your viewers ask questions by writing text through the “Chat” button, to avoid the chaos of many viewers asking questions at once.
Make time for this. After say 10 minutes, pause, and ask for chat questions….
In our next blog, we’ll talk about other ways to make online learning interactive.
My Apology to Technology: Sorry!
By Shlomo Maital
Dear Technology,
OK – I know. I’ve written many hard words about you, especially about social media, how they distribute fake news, ruin our trust in experts and in one another, waste our time, destroy face-to-face social contact…ruinous!
And then – the coronavirus. We have organized family Whatsapp gatherings, with our kids and grandkids in LA, NYC, and various sites in Israel…seeing those beautiful faces keeps us healthy.
Yesterday we had a regular class with our Rabbi Elisha, with 11 participants, including Q&A and lively discussion, on Zoom. A whole program of lectures has been organized by our Synagogue.
I’ve been videotaping (with Zoom) lectures on entrepreneurship and startups, and recycling old tapes, these have a new life as everyone is at home and often online.
My wife Sharona observes that we are not engaged in social isolation, or separation, but in spatial separation. Stay together, but stay apart, is the message. And the only way to do this safely is through technology. Thank heavens for Outlook, Zoom, Whatsapp, Facetime, Facebook…and, yes, hard to say it, but yes, for Twitter.
So – sorry, Technology. This is my Apology. We need you more than ever. You are coming through for us just when we need you. If we did not have you, it would be hard to bear the isolation, especially for us grandparents and seniors.
Yours truly, Shlomo Maital
European (Dis)Union: Shame on Them!
By Shlomo Maital
Italy is desperate. With more COVID-19 cases and deaths than China, it is now ‘triaging’ (selecting) those who get medical care and not treating those 60 years old and over. Don’t blame them – they have to, they lack medical equipment and doctors and hospital beds and ventilators.
Wait. Italy is part of the “European Union”, a union of 27 nations banding together to help one another and support one another.
Right?
Apparently, wrong. The nation coming to Italy’s rescue is not the other 26 EU nations, but Russia, which has sent medical supplies and personnel.
(And by the way, United States? Which used to help other nations? Not in the age of Trump… America First!)
Slovakia’s leader noted that his desperate requests for help from the EU were turned down cold. But China did come to the rescue, and it is China which is now sending medical aid to other nations. The press claims it is done to restore China’s image, badly damaged by the fact that COVID-19 originated in China. Maybe, too, it is done because China simply gets it.
European Union? It was not Brexit and Britain that has damaged European union, but the Europeans themselves. Whatever happens in this crisis, Europe will not be the same. If nations in a union do not help one another in time of need, then there is no union.
Shame on you, Europe. I can’t believe that none of the other 26 EU nations can spare any medical supplies or equipment, at all. Nor is there a single EU person in charge of EU overall policy.
It will be very hard for the Europeans to put Humpty together again, after pushing him off the wall and not even offering a bandage.
The coronavirus crisis – a unique opportunity for reflection
Manuel Trajtenberg
[Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg, an economist, is a Harvard graduate, former student of the late Zvi Griliches, and served as Member of Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. This is his ‘take’ on how we can use the COVID-19 crisis to reshape our own perspectives].
At most once in a lifetime we are called upon to confront a dramatic event such as this one, forced upon each of us and upon the entire world. Sure, we are threatened by a rapidly spreading and nasty disease, but there is a good chance that we will be able to avoid contracting it, and if not, that we will be able to recover from it hopefully unharmed. The threat to our health is just part of the story, and not necessarily the major one: the coronavirus has managed to bring to a halt life as we know it, as if we were entering a prolonged “Yom Kippur” regime, just without the prayers and the fasting…
I am convinced that this same menace offers us a sort of respite and thus a tremendous opportunity to gain perspective on our lives, to pause the never-ending rate-race in which we are caught: to succeed in school, to earn a living and build a meaningful career, to find a spouse, build a family and raise children, to care for our relatives, and, oh yes! from time to time also to have a life…
What is this “Perpetuum mobile” for? What are we aiming at? What is truly important and what is superfluous? Do we really need the avalanche of goods and services that we relentlessly strive to acquire and consume, and for which we toil and sacrifice invaluable time, instead of devoting it to ourselves, to our families and friends?
We are about to venture unwittingly into a very different routine, unfamiliar, disconcerting; suddenly we will have much more time on our hands, and probably we will not know what to do with it, lest we “miss out” on something, lest we “waste” it. But then we shall gradually discover that, repressed by the brutal pressures of daily life, there are whole layers and capabilities in our brains that were never given the chance to manifest themselves. In an ironic twist of fate, the coronavirus is about to set these dormant capacities free, and offer them a unique opportunity to act up: the capacity for contemplation, for self-reflection, for meditation, and the ability to take delight in them; the capacity to ponder social interactions and appreciate our surrounding, particularly in observing human nature, so close to us and yet often so remote.
Shame on us if we keep suppressing these dormant capabilities, shame on us if we relate to their surfacing as a “waste of time.” There are those who need to journey to remote Ashrams in India to “find themselves”, far from the madding crowd. Now we have a unique opportunity to go on with our lives, and at the same time open a window on our own inner worlds, only to discover hidden treasures of feelings and insights, that laid there all along hidden from sight by the daily, all devouring routine.
This is not say that it will be not be difficult to deal with the formidable challenges posed by corona, more so at first, let alone if significant hardships arise: economic difficulties, shortages of supplies, uncertainty about disease-like symptoms that may appear,keeping children safely and productively occupied, and so on. All these and further difficulties that we cannot yet envision will surely demand from us a great deal of resourcefulness, creativity, and mental fortitude, and test the limits of our wherewithal.
This crisis is very different from others that we have known in the past, such as the first Gulf War: at that time, we were in daily danger from the threat of missiles and even from a chemical attack for six long weeks, which entailed a total disruption of our daily lives, including rushing often to “safe rooms” and wearing gas masks. But back then it was just us in Israel, not the entire world, and nobody would suggest attaching any positive significance, any silver lining, to a remote war that unfortunately spilled-over to us. Then we simply had to hang-on, to survive, and pray that it would end quickly.
This time 7.5 billion people in virtually every corner on Earth are sharing the same fears, the same disruption of daily life, the same existential questions. This might have been the case as well during the two World Wars of the 20th century, but then again, it is hard to ascribe anything positive to wars, certainly wars of such magnitude of destruction and horror.
Now it is radically different – what looms upon us is not a massive loss of lives and of their material envelop, but a shake-up of the key components of the rat-race that has kept as going for too long: globalization, narrowly defined economic growth and urban crowding. Tough questions and deep doubts hoover about them, and the answers are not bound to come from our political leaders or from the Davos elite. New, fresh answers can spring only from us, provided that we wisely grasp this opportunity, and refrain from treating it as a passing disturbance. It is eminently clear now: the coronavirus is not a “flight by night” occurrence, the disruption of our lives is bound to continue for a long time – as the length of the disruption, so is the magnitude of the opportunity, so is the breadth of the new horizons that may open up to us.
Life Imitates Art: Camus’ The Plague
by Shlomo Maital
Life imitates Art, so goes the saying. It is true. Novelists often anticipate events and describe them in detail, before they unfold. Take for instance the novel by the French-Algerian author Albert Camus, The Plague, published in French in 1947.
Camus began working on the novel in 1941. He did painstaking research, studying plagues and epidemics through history. His novel is set in the Algerian coastal city Oran, where a cholera plague killed a large fraction of the population in 1849.
Camus describes the initial denial, widespread in the early stages of COVID-19. “It’s impossible it should be the plague, everyone knows it has vanished from the West”, says a Camus character. Camus adds, sardonically, Yes, everyone knew that, except the dead.
When 500 people a day die in the Oran plague, Camus’ character, a Catholic priest, explains the plague as God’s punishment for sin. The main character, a medical doctor, knows better. He believes suffering is randomly distributed, makes no sense, it is absurd.
Camus concludes his novel, with these words:
“Everyone has it [the plague] inside himself, this plague, because no one in the world, no one, is immune.” Dr. Roux says, the plague never dies; it “waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers” for the day when it will “rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city”.
We humans know everything, control everything, decide everything – except when a tiny virus, not even technically a living thing, learns how to insert its RNA inside a cell, hijack the cell’s DNA, replicate itself, and kill the human body. And we instantly become much more humble.
Based on: Camus on the coronavirus, Alain de Botton, New York Times, March 22.
On-Line Learning
Maya Taya Arie & Shlomo Maital
As millions of children and college students are learning on-line, as schools and universities close, this blog will address key issues related to online education.
Our first key point: This is not about online teaching, it is about online learning. That is, a client-centered approach that focuses on the learning and the learner, not on the teacher. With wide access to search technology, children and students are increasingly able to learn and discover facts on their own. The role of educators has changed greatly – from teaching, to facilitating learning. That should be the focus of online education.
Shlomo Maital is a retired Technion professor, specializing in innovation and creativity; Maya Taya Arie is his grand-daughter and a student studying social studies with a focus on management, sociology and political science at Bar Ilan University.
Maya asks: How can a teacher teach an entire class online, and still retain the students’ attention?
Response (Maital): I taught my first distance-learning class at MIT in 1995. My students were Argentinean engineers, in three cities, La Plata, Buenos Ares and Mendoza.
The technology was: a broadcast studio at MIT, with video signal sent by Internet to Argentina. The connection was often broken, restored, broken again – but the Argentinean engineers were very patient, and the session was quite interactive, with students raising their hand, acknowledged by the lecturer, asked a question, and received an answer.
I had a wonderful producer named Elizabeth Derienzo. This is very important – MIT realized from the earliest days of distance teaching that this was a production, not a lecture. Elizabeth stood behind the TV camera, and constantly motioned to me, “high energy, high energy”. Because – when you teach in a classroom, you have at least some of the students who are ‘with you’, who respond with facial expressions, who interrupt, ask questions, engage..and this brings energy to the classroom. In a sterile studio, there is none of that. So — I constantly raised my own energy level, in my voice and body language, at Elizabeth’s request, because if the lecturer is bored and asleep, the students will be, too. And let’s face it, many lecturers, sitting in front of a boring screen, think to themselves that they would rather be doing something else – and lack the enormous nuclear energy that a classroom can provide.
Conclusion: Online instructors — remind yourself constantly, high energy. Modulate your voice, dynamics, up, down, project interest and passion. Passion! And above all, even when (especially when) you do not feel much like teaching online — Act! Pretend. Put on a show. Because online education is indeed a show, and like actors who perform even when ill, or tired, at a high level, so must we educators.
This is Rule #1. High Energy. Passion. And convey it to your students. Genuine, great. If not – Pretend.
Learning From Taiwan: A Deeper Look [Clue: Democracy & Transparency]
By Shlomo Maital
In previous blogs, I wrote tersely about how Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong have excelled in handling the COVID-19 pandemic.
An article in Wired.com gives more details about Taiwan’s success. A brief summary: Democracy and Transparency.
Andrew Leonard writes: “Taiwan Is Beating the Coronavirus. Can the US Do the Same? The island nation’s government is staying ahead of the virus, but don’t ascribe it to “Confucian values.” Credit democracy and transparency. And preparedness (a detailed plan put in place after SARS in 2003).
“AS OF WEDNESDAY, the nation of Taiwan had recorded 100 cases of Covid-19, a remarkably low number given the island’s proximity to China. Some 2.71 million mainland Chinese visited Taiwan in 2019, and as recently as January there were a dozen round trip flights between Wuhan and Taipei every week. But despite its obvious vulnerabilities, Taiwan has managed, so far, to keep well ahead of the infectious curve through a combination of early response, pervasive screening, contact tracing, comprehensive testing, and the adroit use of technology.”
“Taiwan’s self-confidence and collective solidarity trace back to its triumphal self-liberation from its own authoritarian past, its ability to thrive in the shadow of a massive, hostile neighbor that refuses to recognize its right to chart its own path, and its track record of learning from existential threats.”
A BBC report this morning recounts that Taiwan was hit hard by SARS in 2003. In its wake, Taiwan set up stockpiles of medical equipment and detailed contingency plans. The moment China announced the case of a strange type of pneumonia, Taiwan was ready. Incoming flights had passengers tested for fever before they left the plane.
For political reasons, mainland China has vetoed Taiwan’s membership in the World Health Organization. As a result Taiwan has had to prepare for pandemics on its own, without WHO help. That has proved a major boon.
Andrew Leonard continues: “The threat of SARS put Taiwan on high alert for future outbreaks, while the past record of success at meeting such challenges seems to have encouraged the public to accept socially intrusive technological interventions. (Jason Wang, a Stanford clinician who coauthored a report on Taiwan’s containment strategy, also told me via email that the government’s “special powers to integrate data and track people were only allowed during a crisis,” under the provisions of the Communicable Disease Control Act.)”
Leonard continues to describe Taiwan’s transparency: “Taiwan’s commitment to transparency has also been critical. In the United States, the Trump administration ordered federal health authorities to treat high-level discussions on the coronavirus as classified material. In Taiwan, the government has gone to great lengths to keep citizens well informed on every aspect of the outbreak, including daily press conferences and an active presence on social media. Just one example: On March 15, Vice President Chen posted a lengthy analysis of international coronavirus “incidence and mortality rates” on Facebook that racked up 19,000 likes and 3,000 shares in just two days.”
Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong are now battling the ‘second wave’ – COVID-19 cases of citizens who contracted it abroad and are now returning home. (Of course nations have to allow their own citizens to re-enter the country). If only Europe and the US would open their windows, much can be learned from how Taiwan handles this ‘second wave’….because, chances are, there will also be a second wave in Europe and the US.
Thanks WIRED for making this freely available!…
https://www.wired.com/story/taiwan-is-beating-the-coronavirus-can-the-us-do-the-same/
TIMnovate 