What to learn from the COVID-19?
As countries continue to enforce isolation and social distancing, businesses continue to be shut and transportation of materials/resources continues to be restricted as the focus is on access to essential items. Some businesses continue to operate as normal, however over time, the restriction to resources and social distancing measures will mean transactions won’t occur that much. Consequently, businesses will have to reduce operations and pay. This will have a huge impact on the individuals’ monthly income but also on the economy that has already been impacted really hard.
The current situation we are in has highlighted a few areas where countries and businesses will need to review to allow businesses to operate as normal while maintaining measures to combat the next pandemic. Hopefully I can highlight a few areas that we may need to consider.
One country is crippled, the whole world crippled
China is the number one exporter of goods and materials to countries. As COVID-19 was first discovered in Wuhan, China, the country started to implement restrictions in movements of its population by isolating its population to stay indoors. The isolation imposed has had positive results to reduce the spread of the disease, however, it has had a major impact on the world indirectly. This highlights that the reliance on China’s export is a huge issue when another pandemic occurs as the restricting of materials being exported will affect how much capacity a business can operate. Countries will need to review their own supply chain structure whether they can partially fill the void left by a country’s restriction of export capacity.
Reaction
Countries closer to China started implementing testing on its citizens, especially in Singapore and South Korea, for those coming into the country. This showed to be effective to slow down the spread of the virus across a population. This allowed the respective countries to monitor and predict areas where there could be a huge spike of infected individuals. The reaction in Western countries was delayed, testing did not start taking place until a significant amount of the population had been infected. The strict monitoring and testing of individuals coming into the country was not as strict as China, South Korea, and Singapore. This could be because these countries have had an outbreak of a similar pandemic in recent years which meant they have early measures in place in case of a new potential disease/virus outbreak. They have highlighted that early intervention can delay the spread to allow time for the country to gather its resources and set up the required facilities to cope with the predicted demand in specialised equipment and facilities. As we know in the current situation, every bit of time is important to get ahead of the outbreak.
Potentially we may need a worldwide response rather than individual countries implementing their methods to reduce the spread. Could a more unified global response delay the spread a lot more?
Medical resources and testing
The outbreak of COVID-19 has highlighted vulnerabilities in the lack of medical resources to cope with an outbreak of a new disease. Of course, I’m using the UK as an example. The lack of ventilators to cope with the demands has caused hospitals to be unable to provide the right course of treatment to combat the disease. The lack of personal protection equipment (PPE) means that frontline workers will not be able to carry on combatting the disease/virus and are at risk of catching the disease/virus themselves. If the likelihood of frontline workers to catch the disease/virus is high, then the lack of frontline workers will mean restriction in the ability to attend to the high demand of infected individuals, which means restriction to capacity to cope with demand.
The lack of testing equipment for frontline workers and the main population means that the country is unable to provide accurate numbers of infected individuals as well as predict/monitor possible areas of infection. The main importance of testing equipment is to test the frontline workers to ensure that they aren’t spreading the virus to their colleagues which in turn could result in a crippling frontline workforce.
Digital infrastructure
The outbreak has highlighted the importance of digital infrastructure. With the technologies that we have available to us, we can have a digital infrastructure that could allow businesses to work from home, if possible, and allow the workforce that needs to be physically present at their workplace to work. At the end of this situation, companies will need to review their digital infrastructure and business model to see if there are ways in which the business can survive when a situation occurs that restricts a business’ operation without heavily affecting its employees and customers.
Summary
As the world continues to combat COVID-19, I hope that after this is over, we learn from the mistakes we have made from the reaction to resources. A lot can be learnt from this pandemic to ensure that the next one will not have a huge impact on the economy and the livelihoods of citizens. Different countries will have different vulnerabilities and process to handle a pandemic. Hopefully, we can see if there can be a global response to enable a more worldwide coordinated response to combatting a global pandemic.