What Can We Learn from the Pandemic?

What Can We Learn from the Pandemic?

The last three months have been hard for everyone. 

I’m fortunate to not be a front-line worker; nor am I an essential worker. I can stay home whenever I want and, aside from running and a few trips to coffee shops and grocery stores, that’s mostly what I’ve been doing. 

Five years ago, I was running a software company, and I wasn’t even an essential worker back then. I sensed that at the time; now it’s been fully confirmed. 

Recently, I’ve gravitated to learning more about past disasters. Rebecca Solnit wrote an excellent book a while ago, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disasters, which starts with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, ends with Hurricane Katrina, and covers several disasters in between. She finds that citizens often engage in daily heroic acts to help others get through the crisis. It’s the authorities who cannot always be trusted to act responsibly, and indeed may attempt to leverage the crisis to expand their powers. 

I keep thinking, and admittedly I have perhaps had an unhealthy amount of time to think these days, about whether or not we are going to learn anything from this COVID 19 crisis. Especially here in the United States, where the last I checked we had experienced about 29% of the world’s deaths with only 4% of the world’s population. I will let the epidemiologists debate all the other metrics; if deaths per capita isn’t a decent measure of a country’s success in responding to this crisis, I’m not sure what is. 

I keep hoping we are going to learn something. As difficult at the last three months have been, it would be even more depressing to believe that we were going to learn nothing from what we are experiencing. 

When I hear people talk about “getting back to normal”, it makes me think about how the old normal wasn’t all that great for many people. 

Louis Brandeis, the great Supreme Court Justice from 1916-39, once said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” For most of my working life, the wealth in the hands of a few – here in the United States – has gotten greater, and the middle class has been eroding. 

It’s taken nearly all of the last three months, but I’ve started to wonder – and hope – that we might gain some important things from a New Normal. 

I’ve started wondering …

Can We Start Treating the Essential Workers as, well, Essential?

A few weeks ago, I was walking around my neighborhood in Cincinnati. When I got to one street, there were homemade Thank You signs in the yards of essential workers. One for a doctor, one for a nurse, one for a grocery store owner, one for a teacher. (I didn’t notice any for software company executives.)

It brought tears to my eyes. 

The signs got me thinking about essential workers. The essential workers are the people still working in the coffee shops and grocery stores, delivering all kinds of stuff to our doorstep, maintaining civil order in a pandemic, and, of course, taking care of those who get sick. And putting their lives at risk as they do so. 

They are healthcare workers for sure – but they are also teachers and delivery personnel and retail workers and people working in service industries everywhere. 

Many of the essential workers have to work more than one job to support themselves and their families. Some state governments have been cutting back on teacher pay for years to “balance their budgets without raising taxes.” How messed up is that?

We should never take those on the front-line workers for granted again. And we should compensate them better – and make sure they have access to healthcare – instead of worrying so much about bailing out cruise lines and airlines with crummy customer service. 

Can We- Finally – Stop Making Our Planet Sicker?

In March, Bill Gates put out an email with 14 points about what this virus is teaching us (or should be.) This was his 12^th point: 

“It is reminding us that this Earth is sick. It is reminding us that we need to look at the rate of deforestation just as urgently as we look at the speed at which toilet rolls are disappearing off of shelves. We are sick because our home is sick.”

Unambiguously, our planet is getting hotter. The ten hottest years on record have all happened since 2005. This is an empirical statement, not a political statement. 

Climate change is a classic example of a very important problem, one that has huge long-term implications for the sustainability of our planet. But the actions needed to reverse climate change can too easily be put off until tomorrow, in the favor of the status quo, until tomorrow becomes too late. Especially since reversing climate change inevitably involves changing our personal behavior, which I can personally attest is hard to do. 

But we’ve learned something very important during this COVID-19 crisis. We can in fact, collectively, change our personal behavior when the problem is right in front of us. Social distancing, which is on many levels an individual choice, has made a very positive difference in the trajectory of the virus – wherever it has been adopted across the globe. In many states in the US, cell phone data reveals that social distancing started before any government stay-at-home-orders were issued. And, if someone had told you three months ago that many people would be wearing masks in grocery stores, you would have been highly skeptical. But many people have done this out of concern for others whom they do not know.

According to the World Economic Forum, weekly energy use in the US is down over 5% year over year and has dropped to a 16-year low. 

The air quality in our urban areas has been discernibly better during the pandemic. 

Are we sure we should go “back to normal” when it comes to energy use, given that the planet is getting sicker? How much of our current energy system is really about a small number of oil and gas companies making lots of money, when alternative forms of sustainable energy — such as wind and solar — are increasingly mature and cost-effective?

We seem to have already demonstrated that we can change our personal choices and behaviors when we have to. 

Can We Re-Invent Cities in a Better Way?

I love the energy and diversity of large cities. I especially love to experience the city on foot, either walking or running. 

However, at least so far in the United States, large cities have been the statistical epicenter of the COVID 19 crisis. Some of the very advantages of urbanism, such as density and public transportation – both of which are favorable to reversing climate change – have seemed to be disadvantages during the crisis. 

A deeper analysis suggests that poverty and over-crowded housing conditions may have more to do with the virus spread than density. Manhattan has twice the population density than Brooklyn, yet fewer cases. And both Manhattan and Brooklyn have more population density than The Bronx, Queens, or Staten Island – yet the latter three boroughs have the most cases. 

Despite these challenges, a long view of history suggests that people will move to where the economic opportunities are, which means that the percentage of people living in urban areas will continue to grow. The challenge is about how we can re-invent our cities in a better way. 

To accomplish this, we will need to make our cities more:

• Affordable – the lack of lower cost housing is a huge issue for many cities with the San Francisco Bay area being a prime example. Much of this is a result of regulations which have effectively constrained the housing supply. When cities are not affordable to the essential workers who are needed to provide services, the quality of life for everyone will suffer.
• Sustainable – When it comes to energy consumption, large cities are less-intensive on a per capita basis than more rural areas. As we intensify our efforts to solve the climate change crisis, the sustainability of the energy and transportation infrastructure will necessarily need to receive more and more focus. 
• Walkable – Walking around is a better and healthier way to experience a city than any other known alternative. During the pandemic, we are seeing some cities close down streets to accommodate more outdoor restaurant seating. We might be better off if some of these streets never re-open. 

Can We Find Compassion in a Polarized World?

We live, certainly in America, in an incredibly polarized political time. 

Yet we are experiencing a virus that does not honor political boundaries. The virus itself is a common enemy.

Yes, the press is always going to be able to find irresponsible people hanging out on overly-crowded beaches. But a deeper view suggests that Americans are more aligned in fighting the virus and staying safe than one might think from watching cable news:

• “Two-thirds of Americans do not expect their daily lives to return to normal for at least six months, and as states reopen, three-quarters are concerned that a second wave of coronavirus cases will emerge,” a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds. (5/20/2020)
• About half of the American people view themselves and still vulnerable to the virus, with that number rising to 76% for those who are 65 or older (Navigator Coronavirus Poll, 5/23/2020)
• 84% of Americans are very or somewhat worried about a second wave of the virus (Navigator Coronavirus Poll, 5/23/2020)
• Support for social distancing, and evidence that it is still occurring, remains high

Wearing a mask is in fact an act of compassion for other people. So is respecting social distancing guidelines. The evidence is on the side of most people taking actions which are compassionate and caring. Of course, these actions will never be as newsworthy as the outliers. 

Never in my lifetime have we experienced such a common, collective threat. Our collective response makes me hopeful that we can find our way to a more compassionate world. 

Can We Slow Down and Simplify Our Lives?

Most of us, non-essential workers, have slowed own our lives in response to the health crisis. Much of what happens to us in life isn’t really a matter of choice; in case we lost track of that, we’ve got a global pandemic to remind us. The seemingly small choices in life – going to the grocery store, heading for the gym, getting in the car and driving to see a friend or relative – have become a much bigger deal. Out of necessity, we’ve become more conscious about exactly what we are doing with our time on this planet. (In my case, that’s involved stunning realizations about how much time I “normally” spend watching sports.)

On the other side of these collective dramatic changes in our daily habits, many of us are learning something new – or at least being reminded of it. Slowing down, spending more time with our families, has been pretty great. In simplifying our lives, we’ve learned that much of what we thought we must have we can do without. 

We’re being reminded to value our time more, our relationships with others more, and our things less. 

As much as tech is enabling our Zoom calls and our on-line world, we are also learning about its limits. There are just times when it’s much better to be there in person. 

In the face of all that we have lost, I can’t help but think about what we may yet gain.