Month: August 2021

COVID’S LESSON IN UNCERTAINTY IS A HARBINGER FOR FUTURE PLANNING

This pandemic has not only taken close to two-thirds of a million American lives, it has also killed one of our most powerful life forces, the illusion of certainty.  Depending on how we play it, that latter loss could well offer a silver lining.

Think back to very early 2020.  The rhythms of our lives were as measured as the clicks of a metronome. Everyone was up at the sound of an alarm. Kids went to school; parents went to work.  Dinner was at a set time.  So was bedtime. So were the electronic payroll deposits, and the bill payments they covered. Sure, there were little surprises here and there, just to keep things interesting.  But, for the most part, there was a structured certainty to our lives.  Or so we thought. 

Then came COVID-19, updated a year later by the delta variant.  The metronome is silent now, while everyone – from essential workers to bank presidents, from middle schoolers to university professors, from bartenders to Fortune 500 CEOs – mourn the loss of what they believed was certainty. 

Quite clearly, COVID has two lines of attack. One comes through a deadly coronavirus that infects the body’s respiratory system. The other launches a brutal assault on the psyche. It infects the body’s equilibrium, diminishing or eliminating our senses of order, structure and certainty.  

Before you dismiss all that as so much overwritten hyperbole, take a look at a small sampling of news headlines from the past few weeks:

  • America’s Children Head Back to School Amid Growing Uncertainty. (U. S. News)
  • U.S. Mortgage Rates Fall Again as COVID-19 Delivers Yet More Uncertainty. (Yahoo Finance)
  • Uncertainty Is Back on Main Street as Delta Variant Rattles Reopening Plans. (CNBC)

On one end of the spectrum, is an unemployed single mother. She doesn’t know whether to take a new job, fearing that a sudden quarantine might close her 6-year-old daughter’s school without notice.  On the other end, is McKinsey & Company, the Cadillac of management consultants. From its recent client advisory:  “The COVID-19 crisis has undermined most of the assumptions of the traditional planning cycle. Meticulously prepared status reports are now outdated before they reach senior managers.”  

Everyone, it seems, is in their own individual hell of uncertainty.  And it’s about so much more than the efficacy of vaccines, masks, and social distancing.  Most of us thought we had a bead on the trajectory of our lives. It took a deadly pandemic to teach us what survivors of hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires already knew: Life does not come with a warranty of certitude.   The axiom holds for people and countries.

In many ways, COVID has already shaken government and business organizations out of their cultural inertia and into meaningful change.  Before the pandemic, a $15-an-hour minimum wage was seen by the business community as a socialist plot. Many entry-level positions at restaurants and other establishments are now paying at least that much. Virtual “telehealth” visits between patients and medical providers exploded during the pandemic, and have become a significant component of our health care system.  There has also been a dramatic transformation of organizational structure built around the concept of remote work, all because COVID forced managers to discover that their employees could perform well from home. 

Comes now the potential silver lining, a long shot to be sure, but a very real opportunity to improve our lives. Ready?  We embrace uncertainty.  Once and for all, we rid ourselves of all spurious notions that it can’t happen here, that for all its foibles, the status quo is pretty darn good, so don’t mess with it. Put another way, we step out of our comfort zone, let go of our inertia, and build better a better life before a another crisis totally engulfs us. 

As the American Medical Association noted, our country was not prepared to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude.  Our illusion of certainty kept it off the priority list because nothing like it had happened in our lifetime, despite the warnings of experts.  

The same is true with climate change. A recent UN report called the devastating impacts of global warming unavoidable, with a small window to stop it from worsening. Scientists have been tracking this existential crisis for decades, with little to nothing in terms of policy changes.  The good news, says environmentalist Paul Gilding, is that things are so bad right now we will be forced to deal with the crisis. “We are slow, Gilding said, “not stupid.” The motto, sadly hopeful and optimistic, needs to be printed on our currency.

Then there is the matter of our democratic way of life. We were brought up to believe that our country was the envy of the world.  We wrote the book on democracy. We fought wars over democracy. It’s what American Exceptionalism was all about.  Yet, the majority of one of our major political parties still believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.  Some 147 Republican members of Congress voted against accepting the results of the Electoral College vote. Yes but, comes the certainty argument, Trump’s attempt to override election results was rejected by judges throughout the country.  Meanwhile, many state legislatures have passed, or are considering, bills, that would allow state officials to reverse election results on some of the same grounds those judges rejected last year. They would also make it more difficult for Black people to vote.  Alas, there is nothing certain about the perpetuity of American democracy. 

As a joke, I donned a MAGA hat back in 2015, saying to friends that I totally supported Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, simply because he could never be elected president.  Of that, I was certain. That’s why I am done with the mirage of certainty.  Horrible things we were certain could never happen can, indeed, happen. And have. To avoid, or mitigate against, future catastrophes, we need to be mindful, vigilant and intentional in our actions.  In a perfect world, we would have figured all this out earlier.  But it’s not too late.

After all, we are slow, but not stupid.

ANTI-VAXXERS, NOT BIDEN, OWN DELTA

Fully vaccinated and maskless, many of us were basking in what we thought was COVID’s summer endgame. Then along came delta, an ill-timed pandemic redux. Suddenly, there was déjà vu all over the place.

Along with skyrocketing infections, came thunderous news reports of President Biden falling asleep at the coronavirus switch.  After all, the guy was elected on the promise of cleaning up Trump’s horrendous COVID mess.  Biden was credited for taming the virus, so he must now be blamed for its sequel.  Or so it would seem from reports like these:

  • “Biden’s Struggles on Delta Overshadow Infrastructure Victory”. (World News Network)
  • “For President Joe Biden, who pledged a ‘return to normal’ on July 4, (delta) is a tacit admission that competence alone won’t vanquish the coronavirus.” (Politico)

My admiration and respect for these and other major news outlets comes with a cautionary warning: Always read the whole report.  Relying on only headlines or story tops can grossly distort the full picture. In this instance, looking solely at these blurbs, it would be easy for a casual news consumer to conjure an image of Biden personally cranking out this new viral strain from his own Wuhan-like lab, deep in the bowels of his Wilmington, Delaware basement. 

Read a little further, however, and a demonstrably different picture surfaces: This highly contagious delta variant emerged in India last December. It inundated that country and Great Britain before making its way to the United states a few months ago.  It quickly blew up our descending trajectory of new infections, going from an average of 13,500 a day in June to 92,000 as of August 3. Some models forecast more than 200,000 new cases a day by this fall.  The delta variant now accounts for 85 percent of new infections.  Most of them are in people who have not been vaccinated. 

So how does any of that put Joe Biden in a pickle?  Where exactly was his stumble?  Much of this honeymoon-is-over reporting was predicated on the President’s July 4 “declaration of independence” from COVID. At that point, 67 percent of adults had at least one vaccine shot, and pandemic cases were down in all 50 states for the first time.  The media wrap on Biden was simply that he said things were getting better, but then they got worse.

Sure, the president congratulated the country back in July for getting vaccinated and helping to turn the corner on this virus.  But here’s what else he said then: “Now, I can’t promise that will continue this way. We know there will be advances and setbacks, and we know that there are many flare-ups that could occur. But if the unvaccinated get vaccinated, they will protect themselves and other unvaccinated people around them. If they do not, states with low vaccination rates may see those rates go up – may see this progress reversed.”  

And that is precisely what happened.  The areas hit hardest by delta are those with the highest rates of unvaccinated residents.  This demographic through-line also aligns those concentrations of anti-vaxxers with counties Trump carried in 2020.  Sure, there are multiple reasons behind vaccine reluctance.  But the spiteful Trumpian politics of refusing the shots Biden is pushing is a big part of this picture.  That makes the news media’s flippant narrative all the more insidious.  Blaming Biden for a delta flare up caused by 93 million unvaccinated Americans has to be putting at least a small smile on the grievance-obsessed face of Donald Trump.  

The sad irony is that some journalists feel the need to demonstrate their fairness and balance by attaching a negative spin to a political leader who has received considerable positive coverage. This phenomena, which is neither fair nor balanced, is even more pronounced in this post-Trump era.  The former president did and said mostly off-the-wall bizarre stuff, resulting in negative stories that Trump called “fake news.”  Then comes Joe Biden, who as the anti-Trump, presents as a bastion of competence and composure, resulting in generally positive news coverage.  Yet, some reporters have this weird balance itch that needs to be scratched. So when Biden’s July 4 reference to the light at the end of the COVID tunnel turned out to be a train called delta, they just had to take him to task.

Meanwhile, Biden remained calm and competent. He and his team assessed the delta data and made major changes in their strategy to conquer this pandemic.  The communication from this White House has been clear and concise: The only way out of this mess is vaccination.  So he is requiring some 11 million federal employees and contractors to either get vaccinated or face adverse employment consequences. Same goes for the military.  

This move, as intended, triggered mandatory vaccination programs in a number of other state and municipal governments, along with a growing list of large companies, including Google, Facebook, Anthem, BlackRock, Cisco, Delta Airlines, Door Dash, Equinox, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Lyft and Microsoft. Theaters and other entertainment and cultural venues have instituted mandatory vaccination policies for customers and employees.

All this happened at the same time headlines had Biden “stumbling” his way into a “pickle” over a dramatic rise in new COVID cases. Yet,  CNN reports, that the number of newly vaccinated people in the eight states with the highest delta caseloads has increased on an average of 171 percent each day over the past three weeks. 

Results like that don’t come from a stumble.  They come from a leader who assesses the rapidly evolving terrain of this pandemic and then responds with appropriate strategic adjustments. Earlier this year, Biden was adamant about avoiding mandatory vaccinations. He not only wanted to dodge the political fallout from such a move, he believed that the overwhelming majority of Americans would vaccinate out of self-interest.  When the carrot approach left 30 percent of the country unvaccinated, and delta began its rampage, the president set politics aside and turned immediately to the stick of making inoculation mandatory wherever possible. 

When the final chapter of this pandemic is written, my bet is on Politico being wrong: Joe Biden’s competence will, indeed, have vanquished this virus.