Anatomy Of A Lockdown

Anatomy of a Lockdown

by Sachin V Gopalan

“No matter how bleak or menacing a situation may appear, it does not entirely own us. It can't take away our freedom to respond, our power to take action.” ― Ryder Carroll

We today are in the midst of World War 3. Instead of a war between countries, we are at war with a virus in a bizarre sci-fi plot where humanity is fighting a near-alien non-living species. And to top it off, this situation is rapidly evolving into an economic war between countries that is replete with geo-political strategy and tactics on a daily basis.

World Wars are a time for accelerated human casualties, both physical and social. The havoc it wrecks on the global and local economy is often unimaginable. This time again, our enemy is another human being, who if “armed” with the virus, could kill us if he comes too close. Yes, the virus cannot come to us uninvited, it needs a carrier body to bring it to us, and that makes it the greatest stealth weapon ever. To fight back, its not our soldiers who are at the frontline, but its our doctors, nurses and medical workers. Who would have imagined that such a Hollywood-esque scenario would one day come to life and become our nightmarish reality.

In wartimes, a lockdown, as much an inconvenience as it may seem, helped serve a higher purpose. When at war, a lockdown was a way to protect your citizens from air bombings, artillery firing and missiles, it was a way to survive. It would mean that you would be told to stay at home, not be allowed to venture out and you would most definitely be disconnected from simple comforts that you would have grown accustomed.  A wartime lockdown also helped in rallying people from all walks of life, injecting them with a high dose of patriotism and sending them off to the battlefield, with a smile on their face. This current war is also very similar, we are rallying together for humankind’s collective fight against our new and unseen common enemy, the C-19 virus.

Lets start at the very beginning. Pandemics of this scale happen only once in a lifetime or once in almost every 100 years. It is no doubt an unsettling fact that there is no living person today who can in person,  first hand, share his or her past experience and expertise with a pandemic of this magnitude. We can only rely on news archives, historical data records, anecdotes and a multiude of sophisticated pandemic scenario planning done by research centers. And we can only rely on information shared by early responders, that not only changes every day in confusing ways, but is also served heavily sprinkled with fake news and misinformation. 

What we know so far about this pandemic is very little, it's essentially sketchy information pieced together here and there with facts and fiction. And, the scary part is that it has never been more important to know what we have to do, to stay alive and survive as an individual and as a species.

The lockdowns have affected different people differently. The extroverts have never before felt so caged up in their homes, however large or small their houses may be, because to be up and about is in the very nature of their existence. They crave for human interaction and desperately need to get away from the daily routines. The extroverts see the lockdown the same as house arrest, perhaps even imprisonment. For the extrovert, each passing day is extreme agony, re-lived again and again. Lockdowns just don't work for them because it is a path towards poor mental and physical health.

The introverts on the other hand, could care less. They welcome the opportunity to stay home and go about their already normal lives, barring the odd inconvenience of having to step out to get your grocery necessities. One of my good friends even said that he never realized that he is finally living his dream life, which is to be able to roll out of bed into an office chair and then walk five steps into the rest of the house and then jump back in bed he was done with work. He now is able to live this dream feeling a great sense of gratification and self-achievement, and guess what, he has the permission from his boss. I always thought I was a self confessed extrovert but i feel this way too.

As much as there are physical, psychological and emotional dimensions in adjusting to a near-imprisoned life, we need to apply some common-sensical logic to understand the anatomy of a lockdown, why it is important and how it helps us to make sense of what is the safe path back to a kind of near-normalcy. Dieter F. Uchtdorf, a German aviator, airline executive and religious leader, once said “It’s your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself that determines how your life’s story will develop.” So, this is our opportunity to shape our own responses and come out stronger.

Here are some interesting thoughts that I put together, an attempt at piecing together logical reasoning and opinions that I gathered from talking to folks I know and reading expert insights on digital media channels. These are my views, so, please feel free to debate, challenge, endorse and add your views in the comments section at the very end of this blog.

Lockdowns Help Generate Data and Benchmarks

No nation or government in the beginning of a crisis knows exactly how an unknown virus pandemic will play out in their nation. It has surprisingly shown a varied range of effects on different countries, which means there seem to be several factors at play here. Some of these are measurable factors, such as ethnicity, weather cycles, vaccination policies, historical exposure to pathogens, immunity building practices of people and even their hygiene habits. Many others factors, unknown or undiscovered for now, will be revealed in the days to come as more research is made available to the public.

I strongly believe that a lockdown is an essential First Step. It allows those tasked with handling the upcoming pandemic to have a starting point for generating measurable data on a daily basis. However faulty, incomplete or unprepared the system may be, a benchmark is a benchmark. From that point onwards, we will be able to stand witness to a captivating unfolding of the pandemic’s narrative, a story that evolves over time, making recorded history as it goes about terrorizing citizens of the  world, regardless of your degrees of separation from its victims.

Data is also essential. Humans have a desperate need to know how to compare themselves, how to evaluate others and who is on the top or bottom of a ranking list. Yes, its this data that helps create a sense of competition, a score keeping if u will, a daily tracking of who is ahead, who is falling behind and who has absolutely no clue what they are up against.

Lockdowns Help Understand Scale

Having a controlled locked-down environment is the first step to understanding patterns and trends of a virus outbreak that has run amok.  With the help of a lockdown, we can know how fast a pandemic can accelerate or decelerate, in response to decisions that are being taken. Knowing the scale and then extrapolating where and how it will impact is the most important input we need for developing an effective battle plan, one that can be continuously measured and tweaked for giving better outcomes.

Every government has by now evolved a system and methodology of testing, tracking and tracing Covid-19 infections that is unique to their situation. However much one may criticize it, this process allows for identifying emerging hotspots and then implementing lockdown measures of selective intensity. Its not perfect, but it's the best they can do for now.

Scale is an often-misunderstood beast. Knowledge of exponentials and mathematics come to mind. Pandemics are known to have exponential scale, and that is often unfathomable to even the most intelligent of human minds. Here is an example that illustrates this point well. It's a known fact that majority of the infected people are asymptomatic, and these people already have antibodies, which means they have already been infected in the past, often without their knowledge. They had become silent transmitters during some period of their infection, and they had at that time been passing every thermometer gun test, as well as having access to frequented areas. This could explain how the virus infection is still on its way to peaking despite intense lockdowns. It would also be logical to assume that most countries have had Covid-19 even before the test kits arrived.

New estimates now say that there is a 40 to 50X factor of infected and asymptomatic patients in every country. This means that if official figures say there are 150.000 confirmed patients, the real number of infected will be 50x or 7.5 million people, and this accounts for a very large number in any given population. Scary, isn’t it?

This single factor of scale, if understood well by people, will explain in a logical way why everyone needs to wear masks, wash hands and keep social distance. The lockdown is the only real way to trigger a slow-down of community transmission and minimize it’s reach to the vulnerable people in society.

Lockdowns Allow for Healthcare Preparedness

Most hospitals and healthcare professionals in the beginning of a pandemic have no clue what they are dealing with.  They have no idea how to treat patients except from information passed on by countries that have been hit earlier. They mostly have to learn everything from scratch. They don't exactly know what medication or treatment will work and more importantly, what doesn't.  They have no idea how contagious this is to themselves and their patients, what precautions need to be taken and how well their medical facility is prepared to take on the virus’s deadly attack head-on. Only time can give doctors and nurses the relevant work experience that they need. And a lockdown gives them exactly that. Precious time.

Every patient in early days of the pandemic are really like guinea pigs who will be experimented on without choice. Your chances of getting the correct treatment increase significantly over time, compared to patients in the early days. So you definitely want to delay becoming a patient to the very best of your ability, the best scenario being to be able to hold up safely until the day a proven vaccine arrives. Not just hospitals, even you and your families can get better healthcare preparedness due to a lockdown.

Lockdowns Help Educate People En Masse.

Some of us may remember Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a cosmetic surgeon who stated in his 1960 self-help book that it takes 21 days of completing a task for it to become a habit. Subsequently, other university-backed research debated this and stated that it actually takes an average of 66 days, ranging from two months to eight months. Wearing a mask, washing hands, not touching anything, particularly your own face and eyes, not hugging people or shaking hands, all of these requires learning time by humans to become habit-forming practices. Lockdowns are supposed to be giving us that learning time.

Despite lockdowns, we see many people around us disregarding safety practices.  There is a “cry-wolf” effect due to media hype around us. Since most affected people are asymptomatic, only a very small percentage of people get visibly infected, by this I mean those that need to go to hospital or are visibly sick. For many people, they have never seen a covid-19 patient in front of their very own eyes. This seems to be a sickness that other people get and it’s mainly playing out on television, internet news and Whatsapp videos.

While many people get super paranoid with this overdose of information, some get a false sense of security that the virus is out there, there but not here. And this leads to complacency and lack of compliance for safety measures that are needed to be practiced during a lockdown. Many treat these measures half-jokingly and even disregard safety tips. You can see people with half-mast masks, covering the mouth but not the nose, or even hanging it around their neck like a bandana. People still touch and jostle each other and don't think twice about going into crowded places. The average human being is a rebel and risk-taking can even be a thrill to some. Which one are you?

The grim reality of not understanding the true implication of safety measures is that, what may seem as a calculated risk or a frivolous misdemeanor could become your one fatal step that makes you an unwilling part of the daily statistics. It’s really like playing Russian Roulette, the famed game of one bullet in a rotary six-chamber pistol where you can only be saved by luck or chance.

Lockdowns Help Set Expectations

When will life go back to normal? When will the kids go back to school? When can we go back to work and have a normal day and think back of today as an intense vivid nightmare that we woke up to with relief that it was all a bad dream? These are some of the questions on my mind and I know all of you share them.

Going through extended period of lockdown helps set expectations for the reality we have to face if we are to earn a living in order to keep on living. A vast majority (maybe even up to 90%) of the people cannot earn a living while working from home. A lockdown helps us understand this reality better and prepares us for taking the risks that we will need to do when the world opens up to a new normal. We can then prepare for how best to go about our economic activities with maximum safeguards.

A school of thought suggests that a certain profile of people can be sent back to work, those who have recovered from covid-19 and have test results to prove the presence of antibodies, or people who have low risk profile such as the young with no medical pre-conditions. All others are expected to take calculated risks to go to work, armed with a combination of good personal hygiene habits, common sense to do the right thing, and if they are fortunate, go to places that respect government-enforced habitat rules.

Reopening Lockdowns: Is This For Real?

The burning question I have is, how come we went into a lockdown when the numbers were the lowest and how come we are now getting ready to get back, when the numbers are in fact at the highest?  What is the logic here? Is the Government planning to throw bodies at it or is it based on some perverse sacrifice theory?

It feels that every government’s playbook is that “Look Citizens, at first we warned you, then we scared you, after that we educated you, and when you realized that your money is running out, we quickly gave you a plan for re-opening up. So, go back to work, follow the new rules and make sure you don't come to the hospitals that we have prepared for you. Enjoy your New Normal world”

So what exactly are the risks of the New Normal world? As of today, we know that the virus can mostly kill the outliers – the aged, unhealthy and  low immunity population but if they are kept well protected, the remaining can go back to work. We may get sick, but we will recover. And many of us can be treated successfully, since a 2% death rate also means 98% will survive.

With the global economy suffering deeply, layoffs are becoming commonplace. The SME sector that has historically provided jobs to 75% of the workforce, now finds itself on the brink of shutting down.  People need to be able to earn money and continue supporting their families. As a famous author friend of mine remarked, "If the virus doesn't kill us, hunger will". And now, people need to find new things to do, to pivot from their skills of yesterday and learn how to blend into a business of the future.

Cautious re-opening is the only thing we can do, sector-by-sector, place-by-place and store-by-store. It finally helps to have an entire Lockdown-prepared city that is well mapped for identifying emerging hotspots.  Even if there are spikes and selective shutdowns for the next unforeseeable future, the government needs to ensure a majority of the economy can operate smoothly, and this will be at the expense of the minority who may be directly affected by the virus at any given time.

In the end, what will happen will happen. We need resilience to get out of our current predicament. In the words of Elizabeth Edwards, an American attorney, best-selling author and health care activist ,“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.”

How to Earn Your Salary When Working From Home

By Sachin V Gopalan

While popular research on media is flinging around data that Work From Home is fulfilling and efficient for a lot, the fact remains that for most of us, its not easy to be productive when working from home. All of a sudden we are expected to participate in running a household when we otherwise would be inside an office or at least commuting to and fro from one.  A friend of mine pointed out recently that this should be called Work At Home, because he has now learnt many new skills and has successfully become a combination of house cleaner, garbage disposer, baby sitter and dog walker. (He was still thinking of a title-designation and I suggested Pandemic Houseband)

I think the time has come for everyone to understand the practical consequences of a dysfunctional Work From Home situation. And there is only one way to say this.

WFH does not mean Free Salary.

It’s very important for family members to understand that if their spouse is expected to continue earning a salary, they cannot be given unrelated tasks within an expected “Work”ing hours of the day. Its okay to have the same division of labor between family members as when they were still going to office, but now it comes with some flexibility that you may not be accustomed to.

Recognizing that people have a very low work productivity rate at home, many companies prefer to lay off staff or bench them for a few months or at the very least implement heavier cuts in salary, since they don't see the best efforts coming in from staff and their families. In such times, this can be a very disturbing development, often irreversible. Zero salary can become a reality for you if you are not careful and start to take things as though you are on an extended paid holiday.

Here are five practical tips for families, so that their working spouse(s) can continue to receive a paycheck.

1.     Allow a part of the house to be kept like an office area. It doesn't have to be a separate room, but it should at least be a desk, table or corner of the room in a part of the house that has the least disturbance from other family members and their activities.

2.     Create clear-cut rules about what are you and your spouse’s Work Hours. It doesn’t have to be 8 hours at a stretch, but it can be broken down into shorter segments, and there has to be some predictability to this, not at random. All activities that don't help your household to earn a salary should be done outside these newly set work hours.

3.     Dress for work in a reasonable way, you don't have to wear a suit and tie, but definitely do not be in your pajamas or birthday suit. Being well groomed and dressed semi-formal is enough and it will allow you to take video calls on short notice and in general be thinking of work matters when you are in fact supposed to be working.

4.     Making a work zone in your house helps you to avoid video bombing by your spouse/kids/grandma when you are on Video Calls for work. You may not realize it, but video calls are very intensive and energy draining. Even an unintentional entry into the room will create a distraction or embarrassment, both of which create an uncomfortable or funny moment, which it will amusing be for now, but if it happens often, will have unwelcome implications. When management realizes you don't have your act together and are not able to work properly on a given day, it builds the case for them to downgrade you.

5.     Look for ways to be proactive and ensure that you let your managers know that you are doing your best. Since you are not in the office and not under the watchful eye of a team leader, the general assumption is that you are not doing anything productive when at home. You will have to take extra effort to let your colleagues and superiors know that you are in fact being productive and have been keeping the best interests of your company on top priority.

These are just five tips, but there are hundred more if you really need them. Just remember, earning a salary in the Private Sector is not a birthright, it is a privilege given to you along with trust and it is in recognition of your contributions to keeping the company and economy running.

Make sure you earn your salary today. And tomorrow. And the month after. Because in a pandemic, this work from home situation will not just go away, it will only gradually reduce until things go back to normal. So its really in your hands to become a useful part of the new normal world.

2020: The Year That Changed The World: 01

by Sachin V Gopalan

Futurist Thinker & Social Impact Champion

Part 1 of a Series

We are now in the year 2025.

Five years ago, the world faced one of the biggest pandemics in modern times. A new strain of Corona Virus managed to escape from Wuhan in China, and after creating undisclosed local devastation, spread across the globe riding on unsuspecting human hosts via airplanes and ships. 

In that normal world, the very essence of an increasingly globalized world had made way for inexpensive travel by humans from all walks of life, not just for work, holiday and study but also for no real reason at all. It was cheap, it was fast and it was a compelling part of the image of a modern lifestyle. These travel corridors soon became the choice of travel for the contagion .

Yet, mankind survived, as the odds of dying were in favor of the healthy, the young and the optimistic. Many countries managed to avert disaster by early actions that were spurred on by seeing the results of those countries that had acted late. In the age of social media, within a matter of minutes or hours everyone knew what happened when, where and how, and this level of information flow helped most people understand why and how to act in a timely and coordinated matter.

Due to creative mutations of the virus adapting to local conditions, the virus eradication effort went on for over three years. Those who were infected and recovered felt they had crossed over to the other side of immunity, but were then confronted by new mutations and this cycle is still ongoing today, five years hence. All we have today is better knowledge, health procedures and a dramatic change in treatment. Scientists over time, trial and error, found several effective treatments that vastly brought down the mortality rate and kept the infections under control. Prevention was a more difficult endeavor. 

People in initial euphoria of being early vaccinators did not realize that they would have to take a progressive series of vaccines that kept them immunized, and not very effectively at that. Being one-step ahead was all we could do.

So what changed? A lot, actually. The way we live, work, play and learn was redefined forever. Some say all of this was coming in 10 years, but we saw it all accelerated to happen in 2 years. Empowered and backed by powerful thinkers, innovators and technologists, many new startup companies emerged all across the globe, responding independently to solving their respective new local problems. They collaborated, they shared information and they used AI based research to arrive at a new way of living that we are now familiar with in the year 2025.

Lets take a closer look at what’s changed in some of the sectors that were the first to transform.

Travel

More than half the airlines have since been forced to close down or merge operations and fleets with surviving airlines due to the decreased demand for travel. What was once a frequent flyer alliance now became a real-life commercial alliance. Flights and sectors had to be reopened in a staged manner, in order to match with the human desire to fly. Re-opening the skies virtually had to start from zero. 

It was almost as though the entire aviation industry unfolded all over again, in front of our eyes. Airports had to make many changes in flight procedures. It was no longer feasible to take medical certificates or vaccination records from hospitals; not only because of high incidence of fraudulently obtained documents, but also that a passenger could easily be infected after getting a genuine certificate, maybe from the hospital that they got tested or even enroute to the airport. It became critical to ensure that passengers were clear of infection as they entered the airport or boarded a plane. 

This is why nowadays we first go through a health screening area before checking in our bags and get our boarding passes, following which we go to immigration, security and boarding area. At the Health Screening Zone, we now have instant test kits that give a result in few seconds, and it’s not just for Covid-19 but also other infectious diseases that have emerged in the last 4 years. Doesn't it feel strange that just 5 years ago there used to be Online Check-in from the comfort of your home/hotel room? 

Flight seating had to change, the economy section no longer worked. All seating had to be converted to seat passengers 2 meters away from each other with a divider much like in first class, and this made flight costs extremely expensive. Wearing a mask became mandatory, and many new devices were invented that covered both eyes and mouth and allowed one to breathe normally. Yes it is almost like we live in space and it now feels normal to walk around like this.

For land transportation, trains and buses imitated the high health security protocols of airlines. All in all, ticket prices jumped astronomically for the first 3 years as companies had to survive financially, and it has only recently started to come down as the industry found new ways of cost efficiency.

Cars were and continue to be the only easy and affordable modes of transportation as the new models were hermetically sealed with air filters and pumps, a new fitment much like air-conditioners were in the 70’s. One could now go from end to end with safety and convenience and this has now became the preferred mode of travel as people lost the desire to go to distant places that were far from the safety of their homes. A car has become an essential safety device for a family and the demand for purchasing of personal cars came back, dealing a huge blow to the ride hailing industry that had become dominated by new unicorns.

Personal transportation solutions like bicycles and e-scooters have become huge industries as people reduced their circle of travel to within their own neighborhoods. Work From Anywhere practices made it practical for a reasonably large part of the population to not have to commute to a main office but instead go to the nearest work hub and work from there. Yes you guessed right, Work From Home did not work out as expected as people realized they became burdened with house work and could not draw the line as to what productivity was needed to justify earning a full salary.  Besides, everybody needed a break from being around their family members all the time and looked for ways to get out safely in order to protect their sanity.

Humankind, thanks to video and communications technology, has finally realized that the world could still remain a big place by sitting at home and not having to venture far from their safety zone.

This is Part 1 of a series in Future Fiction. In subsequent posts, I will be covering what happened in other sectors such as Education, Property, Offices & Homes, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Hospitality, Food & Dining, Holidays & Vacations, Healthcare, Banking, Insurance, Jobs and more.

As Real As You Can Get with Video Calls

All these years, we have been conditioned to having real and physical meetings for business. It has been the main way to close deals and conduct business in the real world. Even with advanced telephony, email and messaging applications, people have continued to travel extensively for work so that they can conduct business over face-to-face meetings. It seemed that in order to build a business relationship, one needed to  give and receive  physical, psychological and emotional sensory inputs.

Sitting face to face across a table or being in the same room has long been considered essential. It gives us a chance to communicate clearly, read each other’s body language, and be able to judge the emotional quality of our responses to each other. In real meetings we are constantly assessing the level of engagement we have managed to create and we get instant feedback on the effectiveness of our ongoing interaction.

It becomes important to know if the person is paying attention to your discussion, or are they distracted,  playing on the phone chat, checking their messages or even dozing off. Do they look well today, are they happy, sad or angry, all these have an effect on the way the meeting is conducted. Even looks and appearances, or the lack of it matter. All this can mean the very difference between success and failure in the achieving the objectives of a business meeting.

Nowadays, Video calls are a part of our daily work and are not being made by choice. We are doing it because it’s not feasible to meet face to face due to the current restrictions of containing a pandemic. We are therefore trying hard to replicate the effectiveness of face to face meetings that we are so used to in the past. 

A video call, when done correctly, could be as close as possible to a real meeting. Therefore, it becomes so much more important that we use the camera function. We are given tools to switch on and off our video camera and microphone, set an appropriate profile photo, share our screen, send data files and such kinds of interaction tools, all designed by the best minds in the industry to give the closest interaction experience of a real meeting. Only serving coffee and snacks is missing. And of course, shaking hands and high fives.

I have noticed in video calls nowadays, many people choose to switch off their video camera. Some don’t even bother to put a profile photo or put a name to their profile. Now, there may be valid reasons to do so, such as being in a room full of family members, or not having sufficient internet bandwidth or perhaps your device has a malfunction. But its mostly lack of preparation or seriousness to get the best out of the meeting. It’s quite expected to switch off an image of you in a webinar where you are only listening and not talking, but if you are an active participant in a discussion, it’s important to understand the importance of skills required in real meetings.

Why do we think it is quite alright to not stay visibly engaged with our superior, peers or subordinates, let alone our clients and partners. How come we start to believe that a voice interaction is going to be acceptable? In a world of life-changing technology, why do we willingly regress back to the voice call technology of 30 years ago?

These are the questions we must ask ourselves as we get ready to adapt to a new normal, because, let’s face it, “things are not going back to the good old days when all of this is over.”

We need to get used to the reality that digital tools can and will give us a near-real experience which allows us to instantly assess the effectiveness of our digital interactions as we  conduct business meetings. Let’s embrace technology and become players, not spectators.

Otherwise, the solution is simple, I would go ahead and do what I would do in real life meetings, ignore the people who are not paying attention, or surprise them with questions and let them know that it is clearly not OK to show a lack of decorum in the digital world, which otherwise, one would care deeply about in the real world.

- Sachin V Gopalan
Futurist Thinker & Social Impact Champion