How we can stop COVID-19 without any lockdowns!

A wise man once said “You can't stop a virus just as you can't stop a tsunami” or an earthquake for that matter, or any other natural disaster! But you can prepare yourself, so when the worst comes to worst the suffering is minimised. 

We are very fortunate in Australia and New Zealand that because of our geographical isolation and low population density, measures such as lockdowns, hotel quarantine, and reduced international passengers have been effective in keeping the infection rates close to zero.  However, these are only temporary measures. We are hoping for the best that the vaccines will prove to be effective or other ways of curing the COVID-19 will be developed.

Wise people consider various risks when coming up with solutions. We need to ask ourselves what if the Vaccine proves ineffective? There are various scenarios that could render the current vaccines ineffective against new or current strains of the virus. What if it takes years or even decades to develop viable and effective vaccines?  

Let’s not forget how long it took to develop medication/vaccines for other recent epidemics. HIV for example was first identified in 1984. “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced at the time that they hoped to have a vaccine ready within two years. Despite many trials of possible vaccines, though, a truly effective vaccine is still not available”. And it took about a decade for the first relatively effective medication to be developed to manage HIV infections.

Of course, HIV is a completely different virus and not comparable to the novel coronavirus. I’m only trying to illustrate that there is a possibility that it could take a very long time to develop a viable medical solution for the disease.

What are we going to do if it takes 5 or 10 years to develop a viable medical solution? Does this mean we have to keep our borders closed for the next 5 to 10 years? We are currently hoping for the best and planning assuming things will be fixed and we can go “back to normal” soon. It’s OK to hope for the best but we must plan for the worst.

So, what is the worst that can happen? One really bad thing that can happen is a large scale COVID-19 outbreak in Australia. That is a possible disaster waiting to happen and what we need to do like any natural disaster is to prepare for it.  

We need to build up our infrastructure and healthcare capability. We need to build more hospitals and healthcare facilities that are optimised for COVID-19 patients. We need to train more nurses and healthcare workers. We need to come up with procedures that are designed for maximum performance when caring for COVID-19 patients.

We need to ask ourselves what is the most cost-effective way to build up a capability to quickly ramp up/down healthcare facilities for the influx of new patients.  What are some ways that we can use modern media and advertising to educate everyone in personal hygiene and ensure most people do the right thing to reduce transmission rates? I see more Chromebook ads on YouTube these days than personal hygiene recommendations.

Our politicians need to divert funding to improve our healthcare capability with agility. We need to revisit the priorities of in-flight initiatives and pause them if we think they will not provide much value moving forward.

For example, I question the importance of building a new train line in the Melbourne CBD area. Melbourne city will never be the same, as more and more companies are moving to flexible working conditions. Even if things go “back to normal”, we will never have the same number to people traveling to the city and back every day.  It doesn’t matter how close we are to completion, if there is a better use for that money, we should pause that project and divert the money.

It has been over a year since the pandemic has started. I’m asking our politicians, what have you done to improve our healthcare capability specifically for COVID-19 pandemic? And please don’t tell me you have increased the budget for such and such hospital by $20 million. $20 million is the cost of 5 homes in Brighton these days, that is nothing.

We need to make wiser decisions and respond with agility. And in order to make wiser decisions we need to learn systems thinking. Systems thinking is a holistic approach to problem solving. Systems thinkers look at the big picture and consider the broader ecosystem that their subject is part of (hence the name systems thinking).

In this video I talk about systems thinking telling the story of how the British government officials made decisions that sounded like the right decisions at the time of making, but were not wise decisions and resulted in making the problem worse.

In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge introduces the 11 laws of systems thinking:

1. Today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions."
2. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
3. Behaviour grows worse before it grows better.
4. The easy way out usually leads back in.
5. The cure can be worse than the disease.
6. Faster is slower.
7. Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
8. Small changes can produce big results...but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
9. You can have your cake and eat it too ---but not all at once.
10. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
11. There is no blame.

If our politicians and decision makers acknowledged and applied these laws, we would be now living in a much better world. To get out of this pandemic with minimum suffering we need to demand from our politicians and decision makers to make wise decisions not easy and reactive decisions.

Finally, I’d like to say that blaming people or processes will not solve our problems because whatever measures we come up with, the virus may find another way in. This is nobody’s fault, it’s a natural disaster. And the only thing that blaming does is to divert our attentions from what we need to focus on. Blaming distracts us from having a holistic view and coming up with solutions with the big picture in mind.

In my book, The Wise Enterprise, I provide a paradigm for making wise decisions when faced with uncertainty. To learn more about the Wise Enterprise and to improve your decision making capability when faced with uncertainty please click on the image below. 

Please let me know in the comments what you think would be a viable solution for minimising suffering during the course of this natural disaster that we call COVID-19?