Corona Back to office or back to work, clock is ticking
After weeks in quarantine, shelter in place, pressure to get out is rising. This is definitely felt by cities mayors across the US. With the nice summer's days arriving, it is becoming more and more challenging to keep people in. But for cities it is critical to get the economy back in track and start filling up the empty public finances.
Some would argue that what is true for a city is as well applicable to any company. Which is absolutely true. The major difference is probably the 'ultimate power' as mentioned by Donald Trump in a weak PR moment. The power to decide if the city habitant are allowed to get out. But this decision is going to have tremendous impacts on:
sanitary crisis and health situation,
the economic crisis
and the social and political crisis
The conditions defined to stop the pandemic will reshape the entire story of the corona pandemic.
The health situation is easily apprehended; people starting to get out and gather will increase the opportunity to get infected and therefore the number of cases would increase. On the other side, postponing the end of the quarantine would ease the pressure on the hospital for several reasons:
hospital queues - by reducing the number of new patients per day. This argument is only valid if we take the assumption that Corona would develop antibodies and therefore the virus could be cough only once
hospital equipment - by allowing time to acquire equipment to cope with the second wave of patients
people protection - by allowing the production of protective means such as mask, wipes, sanitizer...
immunity - and either getting a vaccine (about 18 months work) or maybe reaching the herd immunity. This seems very unlikely since on April 14th the governor of NYC mentioned that most likely only 10% of Newyorkers have been already infected after almost 2 months of local pandemic. Herd immunity would be more between 60 to 80% depending of the population density.
Each country had to select the proper answer to the Corona pandemic based on their preparedness and capacity. What revealed to be the worst was the lack of answer such as Britain of the first day or Sweden that is getting a terrible situation. The poor man answer seems to be the "shelter in place" or confinement at home. Which is widely applied globally.
The direct impact is on the supply chain of countries. Beyond the difficulties to produce products with industries running without worker, the distribution of those products are challenging without the proper staffing for a supply chain over optimized.
All the value chains are impacted. New decision making process change the notion of urgency. How we will read the story of the confinement will depend on a simple criteria: was it useful ?
Since the impact is going to be huge, with dept, economic slowdown, explosive unemployment rates... the usefulness perception will change everything. Was the sacrifice useful?
Are the USA ready ?
think encore !
Chinese police now have AI helmets for temperature
Time to get some equipment!