Where is the exit strategy?
Here in California we live under a 'stay at home' regime just like most of you currently. All non-essential shops and all restaurants are closed. We are thankful that we are allowed to go outside alone or with our closest family as long as we keep social distance.
These measures are entirely reasonable, we fully accept them and #stay_at_home.
I work with startups as well as with mid- and large-size companies. They are all impacted by the lockout situation. So far they are all managing quite well through this, however, all of these companies will become desperate if this situation would last not weeks but months to come.
The strategy of hoping we can lock social life and the economy down until this is over is not going to work. The human and the economic prize would be unbearable.
I appreciate therefore that we are seeing the beginning of a discussion about how we can fight the virus and restart our economy in order to avoid unrepairable damage. A discussion about how our exit strategy from the lockout could look like.
Let us take the example of South Korea. I am very proud of my friends there, who now seem to be through the worst and were able to defeat the virus by a smart set of measures:
- Protection and social support (!) to the elderly and people with preconditions,
- testing, testing, testing and isolation of infected,
- keep social distancing wherever possible,
- fast increase of hospital emergency capacity,
- and usage of big data from mobile phone profiles to understand which area and who has potentially been exposed to the virus.
I know that the later creates major concerns in terms of protecting personal data, but I would absolutely accept it in this very special situation if it could help to get us back to business sooner.
Let me know what you think.
FinTech | RegTech | Capital Markets | Financial Services
4 年As a citizen in Denmark I am currently faced with the following dilemma: we can stay closed (4 weeks now) which will be too costly in the long term - or we can open up blindly hoping for the best. None of these alternatives seem very compelling. We could also do things a bit smarter. Imagine we would enable location services on our mobile devices to an app. This app will keep track of which other individuals we interacted with at any point in time and for how long. If any person is then tested positive for covid-19 you could then do a trace back through data to see which other individuals has been in contact with the infected person and for how long. Based on that you could then send a notification to these individuals and potentially encourage them to self quarantine. This could be the solution to opening up society again while still remaining on the “green curve” (where health care systems are still capable of coping with the number of infected individuals). Some weeks back this was seen as either impossible or as a huge impairment on our privacy. While the latter might still be an issue (which can be resolved if we want to) the technology is here. Happy Easter!
Retired p? G. Larsson, Retired from Automotive work
4 年Hi Karl Thomas! You are tight in what you communicate. We have to make arrangement Asap for restarting the economy in a month. I believe that governments and large companies could give importance tasks to SME's and Large companies to solve for them even on distance. Gunnar Larsson
"With passion and responsibility for sustainable engineering"
4 年Dear Karl Thomas, isn't it a April’s joke in 2020? Social life and our personal mobility have changed since the virus fundamentally. During the medical industry produces to the most necessary resources to combat and treat the corona virus, the automotive industry is experiencing a unprecedented shutdown of production factories and their supply chains. Only in Germany almost 2 million families are potentially impacted by an auto-collapse and their direct dependency on the overall system. As a very small part of the largest German industry, we and our partners are also threatening affected. Which role we will play in the future is uncertain and will surely be decided by our pro-active shapening of the future, as well as our future-fit services and products. Our responsibility to our families, our employees and we actively force the plausibility check and try to find reliable answers for the key questions, e.g what is our social life looks like after the pandemic crisis and which systems of transportation will play a relevant role also in the new future? So let's see how we can survive and how take part of the near future All, please stay healthy and master the new era with creativity and social responsibility!
General Manager / Consultant
4 年Great question !