Still Chasing Our Tails

As of March 11th we acknowledge two very unfortunate anniversaries:

• 10 year anniversary of the 311 catastrophic (triple) disaster from the Great Sendai Earthquake and Tsunami; and
• The declaration of the current Pandemic by the World Health Organization (a day late, and a dollar short in my opinion)

The question that I would ask is: Did we learn the lessons so far ? Are we more prepared and able to respond better now? My short answer is, plainly, No.

Priorities are Wrong

Just yesterday, Governors Cuomo (NY) and Murphy (NJ) decided that it now made sense to expand indoor dining from 35% to 50% capacity in NYC and throughout the State of NJ on March 19. This is when we know that indoor dining and similar activities have contributed to the increase in transmission. If this was not bad enough, the Governor of Texas decided as of March 10 to drop the mask mandate and limits on businesses.

This comes on the heels of respected epidemiologists telling us that we can see a reversal in the progress we have made to tamp down the epidemic. We have been monitoring the rise of the UK variant (B117) and others, and are seeing a rapid increase in the percentage of cases as predicted. We know that this is more transmissible and virulent and can only expect that it will outpace our capabilities to vaccinate the population. Let's also not forget that school districts across the country are struggling to reopen.

Can I get a WHAT from Oprah on this?

The only thing that we should hear politicians focusing on is bringing us out of the pandemic, and related to this, getting teachers and students back into the classroom in a safe manner. I am a parent of two teenage boys, and both my wife and I are fed up that this is not happening sooner. I am stunned at the level of denial and the focus on businesses, especially those that are NOT intrinsically part of the critical infrastructure.

While I sympathize with the challenges that restaurants, hair salons, gyms etc., have faced, our children and teachers have been engaged in a remote learning experiment over this past year, with around 93% of school age children in remote learning.

So how has this gone so far? Not well:

• This has increased the level of inequity in our educational system, with decreased access to online learning from a lack of WiFi and computers in the hands of students who are less well off, and limited tech. support for those families. Students with disabilities were largely left out of the equation. Section 508 is not easy to comply with, and we need to do far better to include in our design thinking Universal Accessibility Standards.
• Disengagement by both students and teachers through the online learning medium; my personal and professional opinion as someone who has been involved in instructional design, development, and delivery, is that this has been an unmitigated disaster. We have some of the greatest talent and resources that can create some of the most brilliant and engaging games (e.g. Fortnite, Minecraft, Call of Duty), and yet we cannot bring that to bear in our classrooms?! We can do better.
• As if it was not obvious, this has taken a tremendous toll on the psychological, social, and emotional well-being of students and their families. We are seeing increased levels of anxiety and depression among children. And these needs will be deep and long-lasting, requiring years to recover from.

Let me tell you something, in higher education they require a thorough evaluation by an Internal Review Board (IRB) before allowing any human subjects to take part in any experiment, and yet, we have allowed this experiment to go on for too long. I am well aware that we may not have had a choice. Or did we?

Time for a Reboot

Let me revisit the question from the start, how are we doing in responding? Better than at the start, but we have a long way to go.

Amidst the news headlines this past week, Australia's success in dealing with the pandemic was highlighted. The absurdity of this headline was that it was Hollywood movie productions and stars appearing to enjoy the freedoms of a country unbound by persistent, mass quarantines, and those countries benefiting from the investment from those productions. Commentary has ranged from jealousy, criticism of movie stars who can enjoy the luxuries of jetting off and away to an "alternative universe" outside of constraints, to admiration of their achievement in getting back to a semblance of normalcy.

Indeed, it posits an alternative reality of what could have been had we in the USA implemented the recommended strict, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) early on before COVID was able to achieve exponential growth, and managed to get better control till vaccines and other treatments were available. When that first wave of the pandemic was approaching, much like with the Tsunami that followed the Sendai Earthquake in 2011, we should have heeded the call and taken action. As I have stated before, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been spared from COVID if we had put those measures in place.

But we still have another chance now to gain control. It is not just though vaccinations, but an all of the above, pull out all the stops effort to suppress the virus: mass and rapid vaccinations, NPIs, a robust test-trace-quarantine regime, and consistent and effective public health messaging on all of these fronts.

We also have the opportunity to not go back to "business as usual", rather instead to embark on a different course to a new normal:

• one where we build in greater resilience and sustainability;
• where we create greater equity in access to housing, healthy food, universal healthcare, exercise, recreation, and the arts;
• where we seek to restore the environment;
• where we build this future together with a mutual vision, as a greater whole, where we can all enjoy the benefits, rather than pursue a zero sum game, with winners and losers.

That vision is still within our reach, and to quote the song Wake Up Everybody...

"Wake up everybody, no more sleeping in bed, no more backward thinking, time for thinking ahead"

What are your thoughts on how we might do better? What were our planning fallacies and our blind-spots? or are we like Sisyphus, forever condemned to repeat our mistakes?

Andrew Boyarsky is President of Pinnacle Performance Management, a business continuity, emergency management, and disaster recovery consultancy focusing on small/medium-sized businesses, non-profits and universities. He is also a Clinical Associate Professor in the Management and Systems MS at NYU and in the Emergency Management Graduate Program at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a part of the City University of New York. He is also host of the podcast Riding the Wave: Project Management for Emergency Managers.