Yes. There Are Lessons! But Is Any Top Leader Listening?

Yes. There Are Lessons! But Is Any Top Leader Listening?

I cannot get past the unlearned who take away no lessons from the world’s frightful experiences with COVID and the Flu, past, present, and those likely yet to come.?

About five times I have heard large numbers of them foolishly but proudly say COVID is over, only to be blatantly (some would say foolishly) wrong.

Unless something far more powerful and more broadly used—in terms of a vaccine, other preventative/therapeutic—or more thoughtful—in terms of a widely embraced infectious disease risk-management program and platform—comes along, neither COVID nor the Flu will ever be over.?

And neither will we be out of the woods when it comes to the next pandemic-sized virus or bacteria that likely comes along—in three years or in a decade, who knows. And the next after that, and the next after that. You get the point. But it is amazing how few government and business leaders do. Truly amazing.?

Is it ignorance? Inability? Insensitivity? Prejudice? Wishful thinking? Short-mindedness (are they saying quietly to themselves, “well I will no longer be a leader in three years and certainly not in a decade, so it is someone else’s problem”)? A mix? Who knows. But it spells national and individual business human and economic disaster, now and for years ahead.?

It will take decades for humans and economies to fully recover from the devastations of COVID-19 and its variants just like it has taken decades for humans and economies to recover from the devastations of the 1918 Flu.

If we want to begin to break the cycle, it would be smart for us, and especially our top leaders, to come to grips with the fact that we now live in a world where many countries receive up to 1M visitors each day. Yes, 1M. Yes, per day. Unless we use superior risk management strategies, systems, and tools, the world we now live in is all but unprotectable absent the use of the harsh means we have just recently so unsuccessfully used.?

How can you stop viral or bacterial spread in such a world without using primitive lockdowns and other outdated strategies that work to a degree but might be even more harmful to individuals and the US and world economies than the disease??

And how will this ever happen if our most prominent government and business leaders keep ignoring the facts??

For example,?

(1)?Vaccinations and Boosters. The fact that current vaccinations and boosters, while wonderful at the outset, deteriorate in efficacy at a rapid pace. They might be only half as effective (their half-life) in many cases in just four months. Yes, four months. Not four years or forty years. If you do not accurately track this for every employee, you are doomed. For example, possibly a third or more of the enterprise's employees at a facility might only be, in effect, half-vaccinated or not vaccinated (if their vaccination has expired and they did not get a booster, or they never got vaccinated at all) at any one point in time. Yes, a third. Possibly less and possibly more. But in any event, a large number.

If you do the math, this is scary. If the facility has 300 employees, that number of weakly protected employees (and potential spreaders) is 100. If 3,000, that number is 1,000. If 30,000, that number is 10,000. You get the point.?

Of course, especially among front-line workers, there might be hundreds or even thousands more, who are totally unvaccinated, or who have refused to release information on their precise vaccination status—possibly because they never got vaccinated or have decided, for one reason or another, to not receive a booster shot.

We scream about those who are unvaccinated. Often unfairly so. But no one screams (you do not hear a peep) about those employees who are half-vaccinated. Or worse, about their unfair or uninformed employers who put their employees in that situation (and allow the situation to persist) by not engaging and properly using advanced risk-management strategies, systems, and tools.

(2)?Masks.?The fact that masks provide a small benefit for users and a bit more for the rest of us. But their use by children, who might be spreaders, you never know, likely does more harm than good, especially to the child. A better plan might be to ask grandparents to with silence and grace sustain a distance from their kids and grandkids. Their unmasked kids might have received COVID from their unmasked grandkids but that is likely to produce far less harm, so long as the grandparents are noy infected by their infected kids or grandkids.

(3)?Social Distancing. The fact that social distancing helps a bit, but the real distance needed is 20-feet (to avoid breathing in large facilities the?small?droplets, the droplets that are the biggest enemy of humankind). Not six feet.?

And in a small, tightly closed room, like a living room, a bar room, or a work facility, for example, which is where most people gather, if there are more than six people present, and there is no top-of-brand air purification system properly operating, there is no such thing as social distancing, much less 20-foot social distancing, and masking will help little or not help at all.

(4)?Testing. The fact that current testing is wonderful, but it needs to be done weekly or at least bi-weekly to fill the gaps. And there is a period at the outset of the disease where tests don’t work. Testing works best if it is voluntary. And if it is overlapped with voluntary vaccinations as often as is reasonable.?

I strongly oppose mandated solo vaccination programs for many reasons, but especially two:?

(a) Because mandated solo vaccination programs are prejudicial against Black and Hispanic low-paid front-line workers (most of whom are members of a minority class and for very valid reasons oppose being forced to take anything permanent into their bloodstreams, especially if it is paid for by the federal government).

(b) Because mandated solo vaccination programs greatly expose the enterprise to large class-action lawsuits that could destroy the company and eliminate everyone’s job and investors’ (many of whom have invested their life’s savings in a particular company) investments.

(5)?Overall Risk-Managing. The fact that in almost every case an overall comprehensive and highly coordinated risk-management program is missing. If any form of risk-management program is present, it is a weak, stressful, and fragile risk-management program created and installed by the company’s IT and HR departments and is operated by the company’s significantly over-stressed HR leaders and their understaffed teams.

Instead, I most strongly support what I have named a voluntary “Hybrid Infectious Disease Safety Program.” This kind of solution, for a very low added cost, uses strategies and a risk-management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to coordinate all the parts of a fully voluntary program to make them respond jointly as efficiently and effectively as is reasonable.?

This Hybrid Program is best for employees, families, employers, and investors—and happens to be the standard that most courts will eventually apply. The fact that the SaaS platform also records and stores facts, such as evidence of the reasonable actions the employer took or is taking to prevent, mitigate, and control the spread of the virus, is a huge plus.

I know that about 30,000 of my Followers get this, but how do we empower around 1M top government and business leaders around the world to get it, too. May I have your thoughts? May I have your support? May I have your pledge? Let me know, soon.

I need your help in getting the world’s top government and business leaders to see that, already, there are important lessons to which they must listen—and of which they must learn and deploy.

Best,

John

John A. Norris, JD, MBA

Founder and Executive Chairman

Safely2Prosperity LLC

Email:?john.norris@safely2prosperity

LinkedIn:?/company/safely2prosperity

Website:?safely2prosperity.com

____________

? 2022 Safely2Prosperity LLC and John Norris, JD, MBA