The new normal must mean a commitment to doing things better than during the previous normal, but I’m not sure that will happen. For the moment, the fundamental challenge is to return to a normality where pollution levels don’t put us at higher risk of dying from a virus, where we put green policies front and center in rebuilding the economy, rather than relying on fossil fuels, and above all, focus on endangering the fewest number of people possible.
The goal of de-escalation is not to avoid infection, but to make sure that our hospitals can cope with any new cases. This means avoiding some basic mistakes:
- Ending social distancing measures too soon. China didn’t until after two weeks without any new cases, a situation Spain is still a long way from. If there is a second wave of major infections, we’ll know we’ve done it wrong.
- Not preparing hospitals for another possible peak: and that obviously means not sending the medics home or dismantling the infrastructure assembled during the worst phase of the pandemic. We need to continue storing personal protective equipment, medicines, respirators and maintaining ICU capacity until well after any second peak might occur, either due to lockdown being lifted or the winter flu season.
- Not doing enough tests: if we don’t drastically increase testing, we will be as blind as we were two months ago. If one in four people is asymptomatic, we need to offer them the possibility of undergoing a test periodically in order to isolate them and stop the disease spreading. Diagnostic kits must be simpler to use, cheaper and more accessible than pregnancy tests, and we will all have to take them frequently. In the United States, between 130,000 and 160,000 tests a day are now being carried out, and the aim is to raise capacity to between 500,000 and 700,000 tests per day.
- Not carrying out contact tracing or contact monitoring: we need apps that, with the appropriate privacy guarantees, can tell us when we have been in contact with an infected person. We must prevent a second wave. Germany has decided to use the app designed by Apple and Google. Singapore has open sourced its application, so there will be many options. Doing nothing isn’t one of them.
- Repeating the panic-neglect cycle: we end lockdown during the summer and see that nothing happens, and by autumn when the flu season begins — having abandoned most precautions — a new, potentially more dangerous outbreak takes place, as has happened before. Epidemiology is not magic, and the question now, unfortunately, is not if there will be another epidemic, but when.
We all know how to count to at least five, so draw your conclusions on how de-escalation is taking place in your country.
A few other observations: a new normal cannot be a world in which we all wear traditional face masks: it’s just not feasible. We need to quickly design a transparent and washable mask, with ventilation valves located laterally that allow us to see each other’s mouths, that we don’t have to throw away, and that has filters that can be changed, washed or sterilized.
We should definitely continue to work from home as much as possible, with flexible arrangements becoming the new norm. Germany, in fact, is considering enshrining this in labor legislation: it would have a major impact not only on industrial relations, but also significantly reduce traffic congestion.
We still don’t know what the new normal will look like. We may even see geopolitical changes, given that China, despite having caused the pandemic with its odious practices regarding food safety, seems to have responded far better than the United States under the leadership of the most incompetent president in its history. Let’s hope that the new normal will learn from the mistakes of the recent past, and share and store data openly, establish common criteria for data-collection, and adopt best practices together.
We can, and must, do better.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans and is republished here with permission from the author.
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