Pandemic ideas
(Pandemic Diary - day 22)
From my journal: 20 March 2020 (Friday)
As I immerse myself in news about the pandemic, and think about its implications, it was inevitable that I’d start getting ideas from it. I’m not up to writing about all of them right now, but I want to capture a least some of them here…
The first is about planning for the next one. Renee has design plans for their hospital remodeling project lying on the kitchen table, and that (and the new flatten-the-curve chart I was just talking about) triggered the idea that if you’re doing a building project right now, it would be really smart to design it with pandemic in mind.
It’s unlikely that this will be the only time in the life of the business and the building when something like this happens. It could even be that we’re into some sort of new normal here. So it would be a good idea to think about what the veterinary hospital you wish you had right now might look like.
It might have a drive-through window. It might have a drop-off door with a different sort of design than the regular entry. It might have a different sort of waiting area and it might be that the entire layout would be different. I don’t know the details of any of that, but I’d surely be thinking about it.
The second thing came to me now as I was thinking about how it would be if we were doing this systematic social distancing for months rather than weeks, how family interactions would go. It’s one thing for us to opt out of the birthday party this weekend, but how long would we actually go without visiting our parents (or our son) in person? If the risks seemed high (and right now they do), would we at some point decide that the need for contact outweighed those risks?
It occurred to me that we could extend the period of time we tolerate the quarantine (and also make it better) by making a conscious effort to improve our remote communications. That could be something like scheduling a call, and then doing the background work to make it a better interaction by choosing a better platform, and getting it all set up so that the interaction itself could be a better thing. This won’t just happen — it must be a conscious decision that we make and then follow through on.
A third thing, in a different direction… what if we — the public, our government, society in general — took the climate crisis as seriously as we’re taking this pandemic?
Maybe this is a model for, or a prelude to, that.