What It Takes to Adapt to a Pandemic
It’s been roughly four months into the coronavirus outbreak, and we’re beginning to see a handful of countries showing signs that they’re “flattening the curve”.
While it’s a good sign, it’s also prompting us to start thinking about what the world would be like after the pandemic. As climate change journalist Eric Holthaus poignantly puts it: we’re not just stopping the coronavirus, we’re building a new world.
In this issue, we look at how some parts a new world can be redefined — through the perspectives of businesses, surveillance technology, and social media — as well as what’s required to achieve it.
What small businesses need to survive
In times like this, owners of small businesses may feel they could be left behind and wonder what they ought to do, and it’s important that small and medium businesses can successfully weather through the storm, since they are vital to a country’s economy.
In a Harvard Business Review article, Catherine Monson, a CEO of a large franchise, predicts that the franchising industry stands to lose 26,500 small businesses due to COVID-19, and for small businesses outside of the franchising industry, the number could be even higher.
To address this problem, she advises that small businesses should access the capital they need and maximize liquidity as the most important things they need to do to survive.
Responsible surveillance is possible
As South Korea and China have demonstrated, mass surveillance methods can save lives around the world, permitting authorities to track and curb the spread of the coronavirus swiftly and accurately. However, privacy advocates fear such surveillance measures could be harmful and become permanent.
If this is true, then surely we could do more than just be fearful. In an article from The Intercept, privacy experts suggest several ways for surveillance to be well-regulated and ethically justified, coronavirus or not. These involve health officials and experts making decisions on the use of data, having coronavirus-related surveillance fairly justified, and ensuring that any coronavirus-related data have “expiry dates”.
Doctors turn to social media to develop treatments in real-time
Realising what they’ve learned in medical school wasn’t effective enough to stop the coronavirus from taking lives, doctors turned to social media to plug gaps in their knowledge.
In a report by The New York Times, one reason why doctors have created online groups on social media was because information on the coronavirus was difficult to come across.
However, the ability to crowd-source for solutions on sites like Facebook and Twitter, these doctors, by the tens of thousands, were able to make rapid changes to the way they treated patients — a hallmark of good emergency medicine.
