Coping with COVID-19
Surviving the Pandemic of 2020
By: Robert S Weinroth
It seems surreal the extent to which our lives have changed in a little over a month. Few people knew about COVID-19 or the new Coronavirus before the news began to carry reports of a problem in the town of Wuhan China. Suddenly, those expanded to include Europe and ultimately landed on our shores. Virtually overnight, the world has hit the pause button on day-to-day activities.
It is clear; there will be long-term impacts from this pandemic. Businesses that were already struggling before being required to close or scale back operations might not be able to survive the extra stress these steps have caused.
Before the virus arrived, our county recognized the need to address the growing problem of homelessness and a lack of affordable workforce housing. Many within our community have been living paycheck to paycheck. The absence of a single paycheck is already having a devastating impact on many of those families. To that end, the county has been working with a network of non-profit agencies to ensure nobody goes without adequate nutrition.
While there will be a concerted effort to stimulate the economy as we resume our lives, a very significant portion of our friends and neighbors will never be able to recuperate from the economic damage to their already fragile finances.
The new reality, post-pandemic, will likely be no less dramatic than the changes in our lives post-9/11. Hugs and handshakes will likely be less frequent. People will remain more mindful of the need to maintain social distancing inasmuch as the virus will, likely, be in our minds and in the background in much the same way as HIV and other infectious diseases, for the foreseeable future.
Slowly, we will see our lives normalize as businesses reopen. It is doubtful people will be as willing to be squeezed together in a restaurant, on a plane or in a stadium or movie theatre. Masks will likely become more fashionable as people venture out into the world.
More opportunities for live streaming, telecommuting and online purchases will be made available. Even the impact on education will likely be a long-term with a move towards more tele-learning. Remote learning and online meetings are not likely going to be abandoned. Greater reliance on deliveries and more attention to hygiene in a world filled with germs will make people rekey on hand sanitizer and good ol’ soap and water to ward off illness.
The positive result of this pandemic is it has forced us to reevaluate the way we interact with others. It has jump-started the technological transition from personal services to electronic alternatives. Already those who are selling real estate, automobiles and even legal services are offering alternatives to in-person meetings with clients.
This pandemic has also demonstrated the weakness in our healthcare system. By comparison, utilities have long recognized it is unacceptable to plan for average demand. With a utility like FPL, absent the capacity to respond to surges in demand, customers would need to accept routine brown-outs or rolling blackouts to avoid collapsing the system.
The hospital beds in armories, hospital ships and convention centers are an indictment of a system we have allowed to be skinnied down to the point where it cannot meet a pandemic induced surge. The lack of adequate stockpiles of equipment has been our Achilles’ heel as we have marshaled resources to respond to the pandemic.
The world is a virtual Petri dish of viruses like the new Coronavirus currently responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Several infectious disease experts published an article in the February New England Journal of Medicine, stating, “We must realize that in our crowded world of 7.8 billion people, a combination of altered human behaviors, environmental changes, and inadequate global public health mechanisms now easily turn obscure animal viruses into existential human threats.”
That we have been forced to shut down all but the most essential activities to “flatten the curve,” is a result of the inadequacy of our healthcare infrastructure. A lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), medical supplies and respirators and space have placed our dedicated first line healthcare professionals at risk.
We will meet this challenge as we have others in the past. We are resilient and necessity has always been the mother of invention. In this case, we need to expedite those breakthroughs and facilitate the ramping up of production to meet the needs of medical personnel and patients.
Each of us has a personal responsibility to be a part of the solution by following the federal, state and local directives. Self-isolate if sick and maintain social distancing will continue in our new reality even after the restrictions on normal activities are lifted..
For the near term, we need to recognize each of us or the people we are interacting with may be infected and asymptomatic. Ultimately, we must each take personal reasonability for our actions. Until a vaccine can be utilized to minimize the potential for infection, COVID-19 will be in our thoughts and weigh on our decisions for the foreseeable future.
