covid19 anxiety

The Bright Side Of Covid-19: Seven Opportunities Of The Current Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has a lot of dark sides. Around the world, people get ill and die, schools close, the healthcare system is overloaded, employees lose their jobs, companies face bankruptcy, stock markets collapse and countries have to spend billions on bailouts and medical aid. And for everyone, whether directly hurt or not, Covid-19 is a huge stressor shaking up our psyche, triggering our fears and uncertainties.

No matter how serious and sad all of this is, there are upsides as well. Therefore, along the Monty Python song “Always look on the bright side of life” let’s not forget those and make the best of what the crisis gives us. As the good old SWOT analysis tells us, there are not only threats, but also opportunities. With opportunities I don’t mean that the crisis provides extra business for companies like Zoom and Go to Webinar that enable virtual meetings, or for Amazon, which is planning to hire another 100,000 employees. The latter is probably more a threat than an opportunity for most, especially for the mom & pop stores that go through difficult times already.

With opportunities I mean general opportunities that are available for most people affected by the crisis. The current crisis offers at least seven of them:

Opportunity 1: More time

In today’s overheated economy time is often seen as the most valuable and sparse thing we have. Covid-19 shows why: because we have stacked our week with social gatherings and entertainment such as going to the theater, birthdays, cinema, restaurant, bar, sportclub, gym, music, festivals, concerts and what is more. Suddenly, all of that is cancelled or forbidden, giving us significant amounts of extra time. And still, live goes on. This shows us how easy it is to clear our calendars. Obviously this doesn’t apply to the health-care sector and other crucial sectors, but beyond those it applies to a large majority of sectors.

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The opportunity is that we can spend this time on other things—or even better, on nothing and enjoy the free time. Looking at the crowded parks, waste collection points, garden centres and DIY stores in the last week, many people seem to have a hard time with the latter. Instead of enjoying the extra free time, they fill it immediately with other activities. To seize this first opportunity though, re-arranging how you spend your time and reserving time for nothingness is key. Not just during the crisis, but also after it. The advices in my previous article on the Covid-19 crisis could help in realizing this.

Opportunity 2: Reflect and reconsider

The fact that the coronavirus disrupts our day-t0-day lives provides an opportunity to reflect on things and to reconsider what we do, how we do it and why we do it. Things we took for granted—like going to the gym—are suddenly not possible anymore. Furthermore, many people have had to change their mode of working and work from home instead of at the office. This means that a lot of our routines are interrupted. MORE FOR YOUWhy KPIs Don’t Work; And How To Fix Them How Cisco Takes Care Of Its Employees What Business Leaders Can Learn From The Special Forces

This offers a great opportunity to rethink our habits and routines and make changes. Now that you haven’t been able to go to the restaurant twice a week, commute 2 hours per day, hang out with your friends or go to a party every weekend, you can reflect on whether you really want to continue doing so after the crisis. The virus forces you to make changes to your daily life that you might actually want to keep also after the crisis.

Opportunity 3: Speed and innovation

Many organizations suffer from slow procedures, complex bureaucracies and rigid hierarchies making organizational life less than pleasant. The coronavirus has forced many of them to break through these rigid systems and act instantly. Suddenly procedures can be skipped or accelerated, rules can be side-tracked and decisions can be made more autonomously without formal approval. And suddenly employees are allowed to work from home without direct supervision.

Covid-19 shows that, as soon as there is a strong enough stimulus, things can change. This leads to remarkable innovations. Not being allowed to open their doors, restaurants, for example, are shifting to delivery mode. And schools suddenly do much of the teaching and even some of the testing online. This brings the opportunity to create innovations now that can be maintained after the crisis. And it also can help to keep the current speed and innovation mode afterwards.

Opportunity 4: Better meetings

As referred to in an earlier article, people spend up to 23 hours per week in meetings, half of which are considered a failure or waste of time. The current crisis has forced us to rethink how we deal with meetings. Because in many countries it is not allowed anymore to meet with a group of persons, many meetings are cancelled. And when they still take place they are mostly virtual and shorter.

As such, it provides an excellent opportunity for resolving one of the most disliked parts of organizational life. The technology for this is already present and mature for a couple of years, but the coronavirus triggers a sudden need for it. The real opportunity here is to make systematic changes so that meetings will be more effective, also after the crisis.

Opportunity 5: Reconnect and help

Challenging times offer a great opportunity for social bonding and other ways of connecting to and helping people. Of course, not being able to visit friends or family has increased isolation and feelings of loneliness in some cases. But the feeling of “we’re in this together” has also triggered interesting ways of connecting. Some of those have gone viral—such as Italians singing together from their windows and balconies—but there are many small, local initiatives too to connect and help people who need it.

In the individualized societies many of us live in, this provides opportunities to reconnect and create more social coherence. Not only during the crisis, but also afterwards. This opportunity comes with a big caveat though. Parallel to these nice initiatives we also witness how far people go to protect themselves and their families. People hoard food, medicine, toilet paper and guns without thinking a second of others. However, while it triggers self-serving egocentric behavior too, the Covid-19 crisis does provide us the opportunity to reconnect and show our social side.

Opportunity 6: Cleaner environment

The virus caused a shutdown or dramatical decrease of industrial activities. Factories are closed or operate far below their capacity, road traffic has reduced radically and air traffic collapsed, and the lack of tourism has emptied the streets in overcrowded cities like Venice, Amsterdam and New York. While this may be bad news for most people and especially those working in the affected industries, this is also good news for our planet. Covid-19 causes a significant reduction in green house gasses and other air, water and land polluting outputs. In Venice this has allegedly led to dolphins return after just a couple of weeks (although some argued this to be a hoax).

Whether the particular example is a hoax or not is not so relevant. The fact is that the shutdown and lockdown of large parts of our economy is good for nature—at least on the short term. The opportunity this provides, is to keep parts of this in place also after the crisis to make long-term improvements. Along the line of the previous opportunities, the current crisis provides us an opportunity to reconsider our lives and reorganize it in a way that has less impact on our planet.

Opportunity 7: Modesty and acceptance

The final opportunity that the Covid-19 crisis offers, is a chance to create awareness for the moderate role we play on this planet and accept that things cannot always go as we want them to go. The Covid-19 pandemic is a global crisis chat is unprecedented in modern peace time. We had other pandemics like SARS, but their impact was less substantial. And we had the 1973 oil crisis, but that was a man-made crisis. The coronavirus is not man-made and yet disrupts lives across the planet.

As such, the virus shows us that, no matter how well-planned and organized we are and no matter how much we live in the Anthropocene—the era characterized by significant human impact—we are not in control. One simple virus is disrupting everything. This offers a great opportunity. In almost every aspect of life we want to be in control. Whether it is health, airline safety or our calendars, we live in the illusion that full control is possible. The virus can help us create awareness that this is not the case. It provides an opportunity to take a more modest role and accept that many things are simply beyond our control.

Once again, the Covid-19 crisis has a large dark side. But as these seven opportunities show, it has positive sides as well. Since all seven opportunities require a quite fundamental change in how we approach the world, seizing them can take substantial time. In that sense, and if we keep on looking at the brighter sides of life, the longer the crisis lasts, the larger the opportunities are and the bigger the chances are of actually making changes to our deeply rooted habits and convictions. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

Jeroen Kraaijenbrink

I help companies do strategy through training, mentoring and consulting. My drive is to bring you and your organization to the next level with strategy approaches that work. I wrote “Strategy Consulting,” “Nor More Bananas,” and “The Strategy Handbook.” Reach out to me via jeroenkraaijenbrink.com, LinkedIn or jk@kraaijenbrink.com

Pat Flynn 282K subscribers 26 million Americans are without a job right now, and that’s just in the U.S. alone. It’s a terrible situation, one that I’m all too familiar with myself having gotten laid off during the recession in 2008. These are tough times, but there are opportunities within them, too. I was able to build a business back in 2008 as a result of getting laid off, and I imagine that those who focus on the future, and the ability to create something new now, are the ones who are going to come out of this dire situation best.

3 New York Children Die From Syndrome Possibly Linked to COVID-19

NEW YORK — Three children have now died in New York state from a possible complication from the coronavirus involving swollen blood vessels and heart problems, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Saturday.

At least 73 children in New York have been diagnosed with symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease — a rare inflammatory condition in children — and toxic shock syndrome. Most of them are toddlers and elementary-age children.

Cuomo announced two more deaths a day after discussing the death of a 5-year-old boy Thursday at a New York City hospital. He did not give information about where the two other children died, or provide their ages.

There is no proof that the virus causes the syndrome. Cuomo said the children had tested positive for COVID-19 or the antibodies but did not show the common symptoms of the virus when they were hospitalized.

“This is the last thing that we need at this time, with all that is going on, with all the anxiety we have, now for parents to have to worry about whether or not their youngster was infected,” Cuomo said at his daily briefing.

New York is helping develop national criteria for identifying and responding to the syndrome at the request of the Centers for Disease Control, Cuomo said.

Children elsewhere in the U.S. have also been hospitalized with the condition, which was also seen in Europe.

At least 3,000 U.S. children are diagnosed with Kawasaki disease each year. It is most common in children younger than 6 and in boys.

Symptoms include prolonged fever, severe abdominal pain and trouble breathing.

SHELTER BUSES

New York City transit officials said they’re providing buses for homeless people to shelter from unseasonably frigid weather this weekend during newly instituted overnight subway closures.

The subway system has been shutting down from 1 to 5 a.m. since Wednesday as part of an outbreak-related plan for daily train disinfecting. City outreach workers have been persuading homeless people to leave the system for shelters during the shutdowns.

With temperatures around the freezing mark and a traces of snow reported in Manhattan’s Central Park, transit officials said they also would provide a limited number of buses at end-of-line stations Saturday and Sunday.

The buses are not for transportation, “but may serve as a place for individuals to escape the elements in the short term,” according to a prepared statement from New York City Transit President Sarah Feinberg and Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Tony Utano.

Why Singapore, Once a Model for Coronavirus Response, Lost Control of Its Outbreak

A man walks along the corridor of Tuas South dormitory in Singapore on April 19, 2020. Roslan Raman—AFP/Getty Images

Singapore was once seen as a model for how to hold back the coronavirus. But now the tiny city-state, with a population of 5.6 million, has the most reported coronavirus cases in Southeast Asia.

On Monday, officials recorded a new daily record—more than 1,400 additional cases. The number of COVID-19 cases has increased more than two and a half times in the last week, with more than 8,000 total.

Experts say the surge, which began last week, is due largely to local officials underestimating the vulnerability of the city’s migrant workers, who live in cramped dormitories with up to 20 people to a room.

Just 16 of the new cases Monday were Singapore citizens or permanent residents. About three-quarters of all cases in Singapore are linked to the workers’ dormitories, according to official figures.

In the early months of the outbreak, Singapore’s response was praised—alongside those in Hong Kong and Taiwan—as a model for how to stop slow the spread of the coronavirus. The World Health Organization (WHO) commended Singapore, citing its widespread testing and comprehensive tracing of close contacts.

Singapore had also largely managed to quell a second wave of the virus, caused by students and other residents returning home from the U.S. and Europe. Authorities have only recorded one imported case since April8 .

But Hong Kong and Taiwan now appear to have a much better handle on the outbreak. Hong Kong recorded no new cases Monday, and Taiwan recorded just two. Both also have a fraction of the confirmed infections. (1,025 in Hong Kong and 422 in Taiwan), despite having larger populations.

‘A cognitive blindspot’

An estimated 200,000 migrants workers live in 43 dormitories in Singapore, according to figures from the Ministry of Manpower. Most are from less wealthy nations like India and China, and are employed in low-wage jobs like construction, shipyard work and cleaning.

Between 12 and 20 workers typically live in one room, according to TWC2, a non-profit organization that supports migrant workers in Singapore. They share common facilities, like bathrooms and kitchens.

“The dormitories and management of the migrant workers have been a cognitive blindspot,” says Jeremy Lim, a professor and the co-director of global health at the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health.

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“The dorms are structurally not able to provide for the social distancing that is necessary,” Lim, who also works with a local NGO to provide medical care to migrant workers, adds.

Over the last week, authorities have worked to move workers out of their dorms and into vacant public housing blocks, military camps and other accommodations.

Even though the number of infected migrant workers has surged, community-transmitted cases among Singaporeans has been declining, a sign that tough new measures involving the closure of schools, mandatory masking and other policies implemented earlier this month could be working.

But Singapore’s hard-won early victories could easily be undone by the outbreak rampaging through the migrant worker community, Lim warns.

“We are at a critical juncture,” he says. “If we cannot contain the dormitory or the migrant worker outbreaks, it will inevitably spill back into the general population because Singapore is just so small and compact.”

By Hillary Leung April 20, 2020 7:15 AM EDT

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The Straits Times

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, a number of countries including Singapore have imposed increasingly stringent measures. Singapore announced that it will be further tightening its borders. All short-term visitors will no longer be allowed to enter or transit through Singapore from 11.59pm on March 23. This follows other measures including rigorous contact tracing, quarantine and home isolation orders, and stricter social distancing recommendations. In light of all these measures, how important is personal hygiene and cleanliness in dealing with Covid-19? #thebigstory #coronavirus #covid19 ——————– SUBSCRIBE ➤ http://bit.ly/FollowST ——————– WEBSITE ➤ http://www.straitstimes.com TWITTER ➤ https://www.twitter.com/STcom FACEBOOK ➤ https://www.facebook.com/TheStraitsTimes INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/straits_times PODCASTS ➤ https://omny.fm/shows/st-bt/playlists The Straits Times, the English flagship daily of SPH, has been serving readers for more than a century. Launched on July 15, 1845, its comprehensive coverage of world news, East Asian news, Southeast Asian news, home news, sports news, financial news and lifestyle updates makes The Straits Times the most-read newspaper in Singapore.

How Do You Tell Others to Observe Social Distancing Rules?

Deciding when to comment on someone’s behavior in society’s shared spaces has always been complicated. If someone doesn’t pick up after their dog, do you point it out? If someone cuts you off on the highway, do you yell out your window? What about that smoker on the corner—do you tell them cigarettes are bad for you? What if the smoker is a pregnant woman?

The line between righteous and self-righteous is hard to discern in the best of times, and now there’s a pandemic. New rules about physical distancing and personal hygiene mean new questions about what to do when someone isn’t following them. Nowadays, if someone stands too close to you at the grocery store or coughs into the air on the bus or is walking around without a mask, do you say something? If a non-essential business is continuing to fill its shop with customers, do you call it out?

TIME asked several experts in medical ethics and health policy. The upshot: yes, it can make sense to respond when people aren’t following orders that have been put in place to protect oneself and others. But the way you do it really matters, for the sake of decency and results.

“At least for now, we don’t have treatment or vaccines. All we’ve got is behavior. And there is evidence that the behavior works, if we’re diligent about it,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. “We shouldn’t be obnoxious, we shouldn’t get nasty,” Caplan says. “But in this day and age, I think you can speak up.” It could, directly or indirectly, save lives.

When it comes to changing people’s minds or behavior, shame and blame generally don’t work as well as empathy and the benefit of the doubt. And a pandemic is a time when extenuating circumstances are widespread. “Everyone is stressed out and fearful for their own health,” says Northeastern University law professor Aziza Ahmed, an expert in health law. “We have to be sensitive to what other people have the capacity to do.”

Keep up to date with our daily coronavirus newsletter by clicking here.

Coronavirus Patients Who Don’t Speak English Could End Up ‘Unable to Communicate in Their Last Moments of Life’

At the University of Louisville hospital in Kentucky, dozens of patients each day need the help of an interpreter to understand their medical conditions and make informed choices about their care. Before patients in the area showed COVID-19 symptoms, medical interpreters provided translations for as many as 30-40 people each day in Spanish or Amharic—a language spoken primarily in Ethiopia.

Like the estimated 100,000 interpreters who work at hospitals across the country, their services — translating word-for-word between doctor and patient, maintaining patient confidentiality and accounting for cultural nuances — can mean the difference between life or death. “Any good doctor is only as good as how they are understood by the patient,” says Natalya Mytareva, executive director of the Certification Commission for Health Care Interpreters (CCHI), one of the national certifying bodies for medical interpreters. “If the doctor is basing the diagnosis on the wrong information because they didn’t have an interpreter, then what good is that doctor?”

As Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, becomes one of the hardest hit counties in the state (42 people have died there of COVID-19 as of Monday morning, the most of any Kentucky county so far, according to data by Johns Hopkins University), the number of patients in need of care at the hospital is even higher. But the hospital’s nine medical interpreters are mostly gone. On March 21, the hospital gave them two options: continue to work face-to-face as an interpreter or take vacation time and unpaid leave.

“At this time [University of Louisville] will NOT be offering any work from home options for language services,” an email, obtained by TIME, said. “It will also NOT be an option to interpret over the phone.” (In an emailed statement to TIME, University of Louisville Hospital spokesperson David McArthur said all members of the interpreting staff still providing face-to-face services are provided with personal protective equipment.)

It’s a dilemma gripping hospitals across the country that, in order to receive federal assistance, must make their services available to the 65 million Americans who speak limited English. But as health care systems become overwhelmed with cases of COVID-19 and states implement stay at home orders, more than a dozen medical interpretation professionals who spoke to TIME from New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Minnesota, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Ohio and Idaho say their industry is being upended during the pandemic. Unemployment is increasing while hospitals attempt to quickly adapt to remote interpreting services. And they say that could have a negative impact on patient care, particularly as the pandemic has disproportionately affected minority communities that require interpretation in many cities across the country.

Will Coronavirus Ever Go Away? Here’s What One of World Health Organization’s Top Experts Thinks

Dr. Bruce Aylward was part of the WHO’s team that went to China after the coronavirus outbreak there in January. He has urged all nations to use times bought during lockdowns to do more testing and respond aggressively.

“This really comes down to it being a public health concern and a safety concern,” says Dr. Lucy Schulson, a primary care physician and research fellow at Boston Medical Center who studies health disparities, particularly in immigrant populations and people who speak limited English. “Study after study has demonstrated that access to professional interpreters is critical for the care of patients with limited English proficiency.”

Tag: covid19 anxiety

The Bright Side Of Covid-19: Seven Opportunities Of The Current Pandemic

Opportunity 1: More time

Opportunity 2: Reflect and reconsider

Opportunity 3: Speed and innovation

Opportunity 4: Better meetings

Opportunity 5: Reconnect and help

Opportunity 6: Cleaner environment

Opportunity 7: Modesty and acceptance

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3 New York Children Die From Syndrome Possibly Linked to COVID-19

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Why Singapore, Once a Model for Coronavirus Response, Lost Control of Its Outbreak

A man walks along the corridor of Tuas South dormitory in Singapore on April 19, 2020. Roslan Raman—AFP/Getty Images

‘A cognitive blindspot’

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Coronavirus Patients Who Don’t Speak English Could End Up ‘Unable to Communicate in Their Last Moments of Life’

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Opportunity 1: More time

Opportunity 2: Reflect and reconsider

Opportunity 3: Speed and innovation

Opportunity 4: Better meetings

Opportunity 5: Reconnect and help

Opportunity 6: Cleaner environment

Opportunity 7: Modesty and acceptance

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A man walks along the corridor of Tuas South dormitory in Singapore on April 19, 2020. Roslan Raman—AFP/Getty Images

‘A cognitive blindspot’

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