Weaving in this Time of Existential Crisis

The following is an edited transcript of a talk given by David Nabarro (Special Envoy of the WHO Director General for COVID-19 in Europe and North America and Founder of 4SD) to members of The Weaving Lab on 26th March 2020.

Some facts about COVID-19

The organism that causes COVID-19 is a virus and it’s a virus that causes quite unpleasant respiratory illness for a relatively small number of people. What makes it scary is that it is immensely transmissible and it is very effective in making ill and then killing older people or people that have immune deficiencies or other illnesses at the same time.

Although on the surface of it, the virus doesn’t appear to be very serious, it is these kinds of pathogens that are capable of causing very scary pandemics. It is counter-intuitive but a virus that has a very high death rate does not actually survive because it kills its vectors. COVID-19 is scary because it doesn’t have such a very high death rate. And it is highly transmissible because a virus that is not very transmissible, also tends to stay local. For comparison, Ebola in West Africa, which I worked on in 2014 and 2015, had a death rate greater than 30 percent and a transmissibility of only just above one. And that was quite quick to reduce to below one. And so that meant that every one person who had Ebola only infected one other person or slightly less than one other person. As soon as you get down to that level then the outbreak just subsides.

But a coronavirus with a transmissibility of one person infecting three people is super-spreading. You have probably seen the graphics on the television and on social media. You can get a situation where when an outbreak of COVID-19 starts in a community and basically doubles in size every two and a half days. At the beginning, that’s not so much. One case, two cases, four cases, eight cases, sixteen cases, thirty-two case. So at the very beginning, you think, “Oh you know this is not too bad”. But if you have studied these kinds of phenomena, you know that after a few days more, you get up to very big numbers. The pandemic is thought to be doubling in around 2,5 days. It means that it increases 8-fold in a week, 250-fold in three weeks and 1000-fold in four weeks. Or, looked at another way, the time to reach one hundred thousand cases was forty days; rather less to reach two hundred thousand cases; less still to reach four hundred thousand cases; and so on. The interval is just getting shorter and shorter.

What to do?

So what on earth does society do when faced with this kind of threat? At first, some countries thought it would naturally run its course and that simply not intervening was the best course of action. But it was quickly clear, on the basis of studies of what happened in China and South Korea, that if you just leave it alone then all that happens is that your health services fill up with a lot of very sick people, extremely quickly. And many of you may now be seeing situations where health facilities are full to bursting and health workers are finding it really hard to cope and, in fact, the whole of society finds it super distressing that there are risks for so many older people and the like.

So what do you try to do in dealing with something like this? You try to interrupt transmission. People are getting chest infections and you ask them if they have got symptoms to stay away from other people. In that way, you interrupt transmission. If they have had contacts who also develop symptoms, you study them in quarantine. Again, if they are ill, you ask them to stay isolated. Ideally you do this with tests. But if there is no testing, you have to do it on the basis of symptoms. And we are pretty clear what the symptoms are: dry cough and fever.

What I believe is really important now, especially as COVID-19 is entering so many different parts of the world, is to make sure this capacity to interrupt transmission and to do it in a way that is humane and is also supporting community resilience and capacity is going to be a new reality. This is something that everybody everywhere should get into their thinking and their normal day-to-day activity. This virus is not suddenly just going to disappear; it is going to be with us for a long time. This pandemic, and future outbreaks, are going to be a threat that we have to put up with and we therefore need to be able to learn to interrupt transmissions as a society. Every single human being playing their part in what will become a massive global effort.

In some countries, because the transmission is intense, governments have decided to make it easier for people to maintain distance from each other; by requiring them to be more than two metres away from each other at all times. Initially, this is being done by asking people to do it. But then when it was clear that people weren’t going to follow that request, then it was done by shutting down sections of the economy. And when it was clear that that wasn’t working, then countries have imposed lockdowns.

Just in case you wonder, what is the level of lockdown in the world today: There are forty countries than have imposed lockdowns on their civilians. And it means that there are currently well over two billion people in our world who are asked to shelter in place or stay at home. I think this is unfortunate, because actually if you deal with outbreaks early and can interrupt transmission quickly, you don’t have to then impose these major lockdowns.

Building capacity

When you have gone on lockdown, please invest in people and in their communities and ensure community capacity because when you release the lockdown, if you haven’t strengthened community capacity or put investments into making sure there is full public health or ideally introduced widespread testing and made sure your hospital systems are ready to work; if you haven’t done all that, the moment you lift the lockdown you are going to get a massive upsurge in cases and almost certainly you will end up having to reimpose the lockdown again.

So, use your lockdown well, it buys you time. Use it to get this capacity in place. But very importantly now, as we find there is a market failure in protective equipment for health workers, a market failure in ventilators and a number of other essential items, we are also saying, make sure your health workers are safe and secure, make sure your ambulance drivers are okay. Your health workers become now the heroes of the moment. Look after their children, get them to the front of queue in supermarkets to buy their food, make sure they get safe transport to hospital, offer them anything you can for their morale. At the moment, health worker morale in many geographies is awful, not least because they’re worried that they are being exposed to a threat, they know of friends who are ill, they know of friends who have had to go and isolate because of COVID-19.

Back to where this all really matters. At the community level. Interrupting transmission. Trying to make sure that when the lockdowns are released there is capacity in society to deal with this threat. Maintaining that capacity; not just for the current wave of outbreaks, but having it there for the long term because this virus, and other pathogens, are going to be around and they’re going to stick and go on expanding. So we need to be on the defence everywhere. A state of alert in all societies.

Weaving

This requires a certain kind of skill — the practice of ‘weaving’. To weave together the energies within society. To make sure that we have living system solutions because we are dealing with systems that may not only be of people, nor of machines. We are dealing with systems that are fallible but at the same time have that incredible potential that the human brain, heart and soul have of being able to work together and achieve levels of energy and activity that are much greater than any individual can do.

We don’t work well when we are inside regimented, top-down, hierarchical structures. We need to know what the orders are, of course, because you have to have single points of authority on a major challenge like this. But, more, we need to know the principles to act on and we need to internalise these principles within our own settings, within our communities and within our relationships. Building essentially strong relationships with people, throughout society, including those that we don’t normally get on well with. Making sure that there is a real sharing of information and understanding. Including fears as well as hopes. Including anticipation as well as certainty. Because it is only when we share our emotions that we can do this stuff, with the imagination that humans are capable of.

And then having an identity. What is our identity? Our identity is to keep ourselves, our sisters, our brothers, our parents and our children safe and secure from a threat that we can’t see, from a threat that we don’t fully understand. We know that we have to do it but we can only do it with openness and understanding. If we wall off and try to create separate sterile zones all that happens is: (A) We won’t succeed and (B) We will end up being violent against each other. It is our concerns in the lack of community cohesion in the face of a frightening threat that we might actually see exacerbation of social turmoil and upset rather than the strengthening of the human spirit. It is a really critical time for our world right now. We are dealing with an existential threat which is increasing exponentially.

Fast forward. I plan at the moment no further than three weeks ahead. Because I haven’t got a clue what’s going to be happening in more than three weeks in my own society, in the countries where I work, in the institutions to which I am attached, and in my world. I simply do not know. I can draw graphs of where this pandemic might lead to and at the moment my estimate is that we are about 5% into it, because it is only just starting to get into Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Just starting.

And I want to do everything I can to support the capacity and strength in societies everywhere to deal with this threat because it’s the people who will do this. It is not governments. It’s not institutions. It’s not even our magical health workers, who will provide the buffer to help us keep alive in case of difficulty. It is the people themselves who will determine whether or not we come through this pandemic stronger, or massively impoverished and full of conflict.

And weavers are the people who are going to be able to make it happen. If we can come through this well as a society and show our strength and stay united in the face of this threat, then we can deal with other existential, exponential threats as well, like the destruction of bio-diversity, like climate change, and like the challenges of migration which are going to increase as a result of this pandemic unless we are very lucky.

Weaving is bringing together the energies of all sorts of different people, with different perspectives, different attributes, different ambitions, and helping them to feel joy in creating a tapestry that offers security and hope for the future and a springboard from which we can jump to live better. Better as people, better as societies, better as humanity. Now, who are the people who are going to lead this weaving? They are not people running governments; they have all sorts of different priorities that make it very hard for them to bring together multiple perspectives, to see people where they really are, to feel their rhythm and tune in to their rhythm and to understand that different issues work differently in different environments. Mostly, political leaders take incredibly linear approaches to problems and they tend to see everything in terms of black and white, of crude trade-offs. Weavers don’t work like that.

The other thing about weaving is that weavers are not necessarily running things. In fact, if you are a weaver you tend to find yourself often unable to subscribe to behaviours that help you get to the top of a professional organisation. Because, by definition, if you are a weaver, you value different perspectives, you value the inputs of all sorts of people, you include rather than you exclude. And you see virtue in just about everything that everyone has got to offer, whilst at the same time helping to ensure that they can do it to the best effect. That’s real leadership. But it is not the leadership that ends up being under our current systems at the top.

So, weavers have to be ready to take opportunities to lead right now, of which there are many, and not to be scared. What do good weavers do? They don’t need to take credit; they offer the credit to others. Some of what we do is so much in disguise in the background, and others get the credit. But that’s okay because we don’t care who is given the prize for getting the result. What we are concerned about is getting the job done, in ways that reinforce the capacity of people to strengthen our communities and systems.

Of course, weavers are affected by uncertainties, because they are unable to follow the normal criteria when deciding whether you are successful or not. You don’t have the validation of an exam in weavership that we can all pass or fail. There are no absolute standards in weaving although we know that there are certain skills and attributes that we need.

For weavers everywhere, please recognise that your time is now. If you have access to networks or communities, you can encourage the kind of community solidarity that is necessary in the face of this threat, and that will also be applicable in the face of the many other threats that we face. I think there is a chance for humanity to emerge from this crisis with incredible strength. And I am seeing so many signs, little and big, of real weaver-style leadership in place. But I also see some distressing signs of the absolute opposite; of people deliberately trying to upset national and international consensus by point-scoring or spite. That needs to be resisted. And we should only resist by showing that there is a better way.

David Nabarro is a weaver; Founder of 4SD; Special Envoy of WHO Director General for COVID-19 in Europe and North America (previously UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the West Africa Ebola Outbreak Response 2014–15 and UN S-G’s Special Advisor for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Climate Change 2016–17).

In complement to the COVID-19 Narratives that David is authoring, he and his team are hosting Open Online Briefings to answer further questions.

David is also a member of The Weaving Lab; a global community of weavers who are advancing the practice and profession of weaving learning ecosystems for universal wellbeing.