What tomorrow holds for mankind?

The Ministry of Home Affairs in India announced revised guidelines and extended the lock down for another fortnight. The country has been divided in three zones, Red, Orange and Green with every district marked with its specified colors. As the color signals, red being the worst affected zone by the virus where the doubling rate is rapid and green where there have been no new cases reported of Coronavirus in last 21 days. Further, all districts would be monitored, and their color classification would be revised every week.

The color of the zone will determine the kind of restrictions placed on the movement of people and supply of goods in that district. There are certain reliefs for less affected areas i.e. the orange and green zones, whereas in red zone situation stays almost the same. I would have dwelled into the nitty-gritties, but stepping on to the main point ‘alcohol might be available’ if you are in orange or green zone. And yes, you might have report to work from today if you are amongst the favorite 33% people for your company who is engaged in providing certain specified services. I believe the news channels don't have any other problem to debate other than the alcohol problem in our country.

Moving on, the title of the article pre-dates the article itself and it was meant to be more literal. However, given that the lock down measures are not completely relieved, let’s keep it as a metaphor. In these times of uncertainty due to the pandemic, I could not help but ponder, what does tomorrow hold for us . This pandemic has changed life of everyone on the face of this earth, but still there are no certain answers as to how the world will look after these guards of lock down are lowered. To our relief, countries like China, South Korea and now even certain European countries like Spain once stricken by this pandemic are coming back to their feet and are telling us how the world could look like. In my limited research and connecting the pieces of puzzle, the recovery would be in phases. The phases would be as follows:

Mankind takes first step towards new normal

The phase I of recovery would entail government relieving the lock down measures in stages, starting with the least affected areas and sectors. The steps being like ones which are now undertaken by division of country into different zones and issuing guidelines for each zone. These measures are baby steps to recovery with preference being given to the worst affected poor class of the society struggling with hunger and starvation.

With lock down 3.0 declared, organization have very limited time to ensure preparedness and might find it difficult to ensure compliance w.r.t monitoring and reporting guidelines issues by the government. They would need to come up with solutions which are easily deployable across different zones dynamics and are scalable enough to meet the revised dynamics each week. They would also need to assess their employee sentiments, mood meter and how productivity is impacted.

Mankind’s will to survive with Corona

The experts believe that the effects of this virus could extend up to two years, accordingly preventive measures would need to be taken. In the combined experience of humanity against this virus, there are three steps that need to be taken, ‘testing, testing and more testing’. It is believed that each country would need to upgrade its testing capabilities and involve health workers which would take samples of majority of population. The next step is to engage technology tools to collate the data for state of health of its citizens. As shown by countries like China and South Korea, app-based solution tracking the movement of the affected citizens and publicly announcing movement of such citizens would become the norm. This is the best available solution for contact tracing available today. Doubts are being raised as to privacy of the citizens, but any concerns must be set aside for greater good.

Country like India where wearing of mask and social distancing norms are not in our genes, we need to fully adopt them for our survival. Doing so, this virus can surely do some ecological good to our planet by changing human habits. In order to live among Corona and survive we should postpone unnecessary travel plans and use technology to connect, avoid excessive ordering of food from restaurants and eat in limits, prefer vegetarian food, increase immunity by doing home exercises and occasional walks, avoid unnecessary huge gathering in marriage and other events and most important spend more time with family than friends.

Implementation of above measures would require businesses to come up with new innovative products and solutions in the changing environment. Government would also need to be on their toes in developing effective regulatory and tax norms for these businesses to flourish and make up for the fall in tax revenue on account of relief measures and lock down.

Mankind will prevail over Corona

There are human trials of vaccine are currently undergoing across the globe, with major headway being made in Oxford University. Also, India is doing human trials of plasma therapy and has had initial success. But all these trials are at a nascent stage, any potential impact is not expected before September this year. Also, there are no comments on distribution of these vaccines, as the demand and supply have huge gaps. Given the initial success and combined intelligence of human mind, the cure to coronavirus is expected soon and corona will all be ‘just a writer’s thought in 2020 history textbook.

At that moment we all will see a steep rise in the global economy, the uptrend of the V shape recovery, the economists of the world are debating about. The economy would yield exponential growth for those businesses who were fighting each day during lock down for sustainability and survival, who stretched day and night in thinking of alternative means of doing the business, who invested in technology, optimized their business models for tax and regulatory perspective, and invested in development and learning of their people, in summary who embraced this virus as an opportunity and not a threat for their business.

Phases could be implemented sequentially or parallelly, given the circumstances and stage in spread of virus within a region or country. What is beyond doubt is the fact is that any sense of normalcy cannot be expected before availability of cure to public at large. Even post that, our behavior should change for providing a better future for our next generation. These measures related to hygiene and health should be imbibed forever for a better and healthier tomorrow and I don’t believe anybody should complain about this. Stay safe...