Combating COVID-19 requires a plan

March 20, 2020

COVID-19, the current strain of coronavirus that has the world on high alert, has many of us thinking about our own futures.

Schools have been closed for as long as two weeks as of now. I live in Chicago and Chicago Public Schools have been closed since this Tuesday, 3/17/20. Chicago originally began with a two week closure, but have already extended the closure to April 20, 2020.

Bars and restaurants are closed to dine-in customers.

Public gatherings have been banned, which means no concerts, no conferences, no flying.

All of those jobs have, within a matter of a couple of weeks, vanished.

There will be winners in this game of economics. Medical supplies and virtual conferencing are the two that I can think of right now. But that is few and far between compared with the number of industries that are shut down.

The United States government has just proposed a package to support people and businesses. I see all of the people that they're trying to help - tax breaks for businesses with less than 500 employees and cash for middle-to-low income households are just two of the measures.

First, is there a plan for how this will be made up? Anyone can pull out their credit card, but fiscally responsible people have a plan for repayment, even when it's an emergency and they're spending beyond their immediate means.

There has to be a plan.

Colleges and Universities have closed their campuses. However, medical institutions are going to need more staff sooner than later, and forget doctors - we're talking nurses, nurse aids, lab techs, phlebotomists, and more.

There has to be a plan.

It is being reported the the Trump Administration did a run through on the government's preparedness for a pandemic last year which showed that the country was not prepared to deal with the situation we're facing. Here's a terrific article by the New York Times about the lack of response by the current administration to a pandemic test scenario that was failed.

There was no plan.

Here's what I think we need to do:

Despite school and other institutional closures, emergency training needs to be done for new medical staff in areas listed above: nurses, techs, aids, etc. In other words, the people who are hands-on in patient care and who can actually read tests. A single doctor with excellent delegation skills can do a lot with a well-trained support staff and system.

Distribution of supplies needs to be centralized by leading logistics companies. We're talking about air, rail, and ground. We're talking about warehousing, manufacturing, and sourcing. In other words, vertical and horizontal integration. Does anybody do that better than Wal-Mart and Amazon? Combine that with companies like XPO, UPS, and DHL.

Technological infrastucture to support workforce and supply chains? Who better than Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ziprecruiter?

Manufacturing like Ford, GM, Tesla, and 3M.

In this age of social networking, data analytics, and technological advances, there is no reason that these massive "too big to fail" companies, in this time of extreme need, can't work together in an effort that resembles a war-time retooling.

In short, we're all in this together for the next 18 months. Hopefully we won't solely rely on tax breaks, but instead on planning and execution in a cooperative way (as opposed to centralized) in order to achieve the desired result: the slowing of the COVID-19 outbreak until our eventual ability to actually treat and prevent it.