We should not be spiking the football in the endzone just yet. The next two months will tell us if the vaccination effort can overcome the variants of the disease and the too-early "openings" driven by political desires.
Lastly, see my call at the end of the linked piece for state and local funding of public health. It will not be another 100 years before we have another pandemic.
Since there is a paywall--here is the text of the op-ed:
Observations and Lessons from a Year of COVID-19
By Eric Holdeman
What a year it has been. The advent of the coronavirus has changed just about everything that has to do with most business sectors. Some segments of the economy have taken it on the chin and others are not only surviving, but even thriving within the new rules that the pandemic has given us. Like with any other disaster, there are lessons to be learned from a ‘dog year’ of living with the virus.
You don’t have to tell the entertainment, tourism, travel industry, service sector of the economy that business has been terrible and the recovery, such as it is today, very slow. Many restaurants have closed permanently, hoteliers have occupancy rates as low as 10%. Then there is the Convention Center—what conventions? The cruise industry is on life support and everyone who tied their business to supporting the annual 1.2 million passengers, 10 cruise lines and 18 ships that developed a Seattle $7.8 billion tourism industry is gone. All wiped out in one swift round of cancelled sailings and a lost cruise season—or perhaps two seasons.
If anything is to be learned it is the value of savings and maintaining a financial buffer that needs to be built up when times are good. The never ending increasing profits month by month, year by year will not go on forever. For Seattle the term “rainy day fund” is an appropriate. Admittedly, the small mom and pop store might survive for a few weeks or months, but a year is really tough.
For all the information technology companies with workers that filled our roads, transit buses and trains—they were sent to work from home overnight. Everyone scrambled to develop new human resource policies to adapt to the new reality. There was a rush to video conferencing companies, Skype, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and more. Each company gravitated to one or another. Schools closed and parents found out that remote learning might not include much actual ‘learning’ and developed a new appreciation for what teachers and schools provide in the form of education and daycare.
It has been reported that it is women who have borne the greatest burden of children being home and many women have left the workforce, giving up their careers to care for their families. Reentering the job market after leaving will not be easy for many women.
Governments found themselves also unprepared to accommodate a completely remote workforce. There were computer equipment and connectivity issues for people trying to achieve a socially distanced workplace with secure communications. Those that had transitioned operations to a cloud environment and promoted e-government solutions before the pandemic fared better than those who had not taken those steps. Governments at state and local levels are having to deal with reduced retail tax revenues due to closed stores and depressed customer traffic.
Downtown Seattle is going to be struggling for many years to come. Businesses have found that a remote workforce can still have good productivity and the overhead of maintaining a large physical building presence will not be needed. Previously Amazon itself had 47 buildings in Seattle alone. Only a portion of those will ever be fully reoccupied moving forward. The estimate for Seattle is that before the pandemic there were 400,000 commuters coming into the city each day. The goal is to return to a minimum of 100,000 in the near future, with 400K a thing of the past, even after the pandemic is over.
As we all look forward to a future with the pandemic in our rear view mirrors, the virus is not done with us yet. Today it is a race between how fast we can vaccinate people and the now rapidly spreading variants of the virus that have a much higher transmission rate. Unfortunately, I’m putting my money on the variant. We fell behind in the race early and we have not been able to catch-up. At this writing there are 441,000 deaths nationally (401K at the time of the inauguration) with projections to be at 500,000 in March. To put this into perspective, the 1918 flu pandemic was estimated to have killed 675,000 Americans. At this point that record appears to be within reach—and is not one we want to break.
Perhaps the last lesson to be learned is that a strong public health program is worth its weight in gold. If public health is a local government function, then local government cannot just rely on fickled federal funding for something that is their responsibility. We need a robust public health capability because the next pandemic will not be 100 years from now. The world has shrunk and a disease in some remote village can be across the globe in a few hours or days.
When infections finally drop, hospitalizations are inconsequential and the terrible toll of deaths end, we will have achieved a new normal. It will not be what it once was, but we will adapt and move forward. We should morn the dead, give thanks to scientists and the medical professionals who have sacrificed so much—and yes, the meat packers, grocery clerks and bus drivers. However, I believe that you need to brace yourself for up to another full year of dealing with the coronavirus and all its ramifications.
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Eric Holdeman is the director of the Center for Regional Disaster Resilience.
