Question

I need some assistance with my 2000 word essay I am writing about COVID-19 and how it is affecting and affected the business industry around the world. Thank you.

Answer 1

COVID-19 is now quickly spreading across the world. Almost every country has cases reported but the burden is spread asymmetrically. Over the past seven days, 46% of new confirmed cases in Europe and 39% in the United States have been registered. To some extent, this is because the countries are at different points of the pandemic. Some who were successful at initial containment, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, have seen resurgence and are taking more steps to resolve it. Others, like many Western European countries, have seen a spike of new cases or are starting to decline, and are debating the best path to reopening their economies

Some countries appear to be at the height of infection and are desperately developing capacity for the surge in their health care systems. The number of cases is fast growing in other parts of the world. Countries like Russia and Turkey are seeing a recent speeding up. India, too, has witnessed a large increase in the number of cases since early April, and has developed its response plan, including expanding the nationwide lockdown. The resources and strategies to be used for public-health differ greatly based on this status.

Measures including physical distance, travel limits, efficient use of personal protective equipment (PPE), monitoring and identification, and surge potential in healthcare require more or less focus, depending on the disease process and local context. Local use of these steps differs considerably — physical distancing can be almost impossible in crowded urban environments, for example, and communication tracing apps and digital devices like those used in China may not be suitable elsewhere. Another difficulty is the dependencies between these measures: to take one example, the timeliness and rigor of physical distancing measures significantly affect whether other methods should be deployed

While consensus has developed around the use of physical distance to delay transmission in many high-prevalence settings, a few countries, including Sweden, are implementing an alternative "herd immunity" strategy based on protecting the most vulnerable populations while using only minimal distancing steps to flatten the curve for others. The aims are to preserve many aspects of today's economic and social life and, over time, grow a sufficiently large pool of exposed citizens (about 70 to 80 percent) to "protect the herd." Other countries are watching closely the outcome of this strategy.

It's possible the months ahead will be very unpredictable and complex. This now seems likely that there will be a local revival in some areas as sanctions are relaxed and markets reopen. At the earliest stages, that will affect the countries. For example, Singapore has seen a revival largely from imported cases, which has led to local transmission; this implies that international travel restrictions may continue. As China slowly reopenes, it will educate strategies around the world about the methods it has used and their effectiveness. The experience of Western Europe in easing constraints, and the most effective approaches there, will inform the approaches being implemented in the USA.

Public awareness and consensus will change day by day, taking into account the range of methods in use. We'll continue to learn more about the coronavirus — how it mutates, the length of immunity, the mechanisms of its transmission, and so on. For example, it now seems that, despite the recent rapid growth in a number of hot spots in the Southern Hemisphere, the virus probably won't be highly seasonal. But it is still possible that summer's arrival in the Northern Hemisphere could delay transmission considerably, as shown by some studies in both laboratories and natural contexts.

The health-system's efficiency is booming and how it is sustained over time. Countries with rising numbers of cases are finding ways to dramatically expand their critical-care capability. Their willingness to do so, and drive COVID-19 mortality down to lower rates, would not only save lives but also build trust in the willingness of their health systems to handle a revival. Over time, as plateau situations, and then decline, concerns will arise as to how long to retain surge capacity while still protecting against resurgence. In addition, universal access to viral testing will become increasingly necessary as countries and cities plan to loosen distancing policies to identify and monitor flare-ups quickly. In certain countries, this capacity for testing may be combined with at-scale touch tracing, with embedded privacy-by-design; and quarantine facilities to help identify hot spots and avoid a wider resurgence.

Only when enough people become immune to the disease to blunt transmission, either through a vaccine or direct exposure, can COVID-19's threat to lives and livelihoods solve fully. Before then, governments seeking to revive their economies will have public-health programs powerful enough to identify and respond to incidents. In evaluating readiness the first and most obvious factor is the number of new cases in a given area. Regions with substantial ongoing transmission would expect a resumption of economic activity to result only in further transmission. Case numbers and, most significantly, hospitalizations must be small enough for an individual healthcare system to handle

When European countries start discussing how to escape lockdowns, local leaders are often the people best positioned to evaluate conditions and implement steps to improve economic recovery while maintaining public health. Decisions on what steps to adopt, when and where to take locally — district by district where possible — as there are significant variations in the severity of the crisis and economic circumstances

critical elements will be needed by the authorities to ensure robust implementation. Firstly, leaders would need reliable, ready-to-act systems of local authorities. Regional governments in Italy have worked with Rome to create a regional lockdown that would allow regions to impose more stringent rules as required. Second, approaches and policies need to be transparent and concise, so that the public and company can understand them. It may include the use of new modes of communication, including mobile messaging.

Safeguards to business. When the risk of contagion remains for 12 to 18 months, members of the public and private sectors will encourage the most successful adaptations and protections to economic operation, including physical barriers, face guards, physical distance, pre-entry health screening, and generous and flexible sick leave. Sectors may vary with how important they are and how safeguardable they are.Cover the weak. COVID-19 is particularly destabilizing for vulnerable groups including people with chronic physical or mental health problems, reduced mobility, advanced age and unmet basic needs such as food and housing insecurity

Thinking back on social contracts. The State plays an important and expanded role in emergencies, protecting citizens and coordinating the response. This change in power changes long-held assumptions about individual and institutional roles. Defining the prospect of work and consumption. The crisis has pushed new technologies in all facets of Asian life, from e-commerce to remote work and learning apps, including DingTalk, WeChat Job, and Tencent Meeting from Alibaba. New business habits and shopping will definitely become a permanent part in the next standard.

Mobilisation of capital at both speed and size. In weeks, China has expanded physicians and hospital beds to tens of thousands. Many governments have invested in new transmission modeling software and have launched major economic-stimulus programs. Asia has a proven resource mobilizing capacity in a crisis. The change from globalisation to regionalisation. The pandemic has highlighted the threatening reliance of the world on weak nodes in global supply chains. For example, China accounts for about 50 to 70 percent of global copper, iron ore, metallurgical coal, and nickel demand. We may see a major transformation with manufacturing and procurement shifting closer to end consumers and businesses locating or regionalizing their supply chain

Growth of new transmission complexes and seasonal evidence. Although most countries have at least one case in the world, the majority of counts are fairly small. The degree to which these countries follow the path of rapidly-controlled countries like Singapore versus Western Europe and the United States will be a major driver of success. In addition, these geographies often tend to more tropical environments and may provide some evidence of how much of a mitigating effect heat and humidity on the coronavirus would be having. If the virus continues to be seasonal, then this has the ability to form complexes in both emerging and current transmission.

Effect of measurements the vary physically. We know that the number of new COVID-19 cases can be substantially decreased by robust, at-scale, physical-distancing steps. However, despite the number of methods that are being used — and the varying stringency with which they are being implemented — there is still much to be learned about what actually works and how long. We'll know even more over the next one to two weeks when we begin to see signs of the effects of physical distancing over Europe and the US.

Since the world has awoken to COVID-19's possible threats, major attempts have been made to rapidly add resources to the healthcare system. It rightly focussed on increasing resources for emergency treatment, including ventilators, and building stocks of other essential medical supplies, such as personal protective equipment. If this surge (combined with attempts to reduce health system demand) will avoid the overwhelming health systems, COVID-19 mortality would be substantially lower. A potential benefit may be the development of scientifically approved therapies, but the emerging evidence on that front is mixed, so far.

When policymakers begin to think about what's needed to handle a post-peak climate, the public-health strategies applied should prioritize differently from the emphasis of today in Europe and the United States. These will include on-scale testing, sophisticated real-time monitoring, robust contact tracking, and fast, targeted quarantine to isolate cases and contacts. This combination of methods is how COVID-19 was rapidly contained in Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan An antibody check in this arsenal would be a powerful weapon, because it would indicate which people are at risk, and who are not. Even as public health officials navigate a time of unprecedented demand on the health care system, they will have to plan Herd immunity emerging. Herd immunity occurs when a large portion of the population is not susceptible to an infectious disease; transmission does not spread at that stage, due to lack of hosts available. This usually happens either by widespread exposure or through vaccination. For a disease as contagious as COVID-19, scientists agree that to establish herd immunity more than two-thirds of the population will need to be immune. But there's a lot we don't know about the likelihood of several strains of the virus — and about the duration of human immunity. Answering such questions would have major implications for the continuation of the pandemic.

We see huge resources being spent in suppressing the coronavirus while others are urging even faster and more stringent steps. We also see considerable resources being spent on stabilizing the economy by means of public-policy responses. However, we need to find ways to "timebox" this occurrence to prevent irreversible harm to our livelihoods: we have to think about how to kill the epidemic and shorten the length of the economic shock. In order to help decision-makers, we have developed scenarios focused on three possible pathways for the spread of the virus and the response to public health and three potential rates of effectiveness for governmental economic response.

Eventually the spread of COVID-19 is regulated in both of these, and major economic systemic harm is prevented. These scenarios represent a global average while circumstances may eventually differ according to country and area. Yet all four of those situations lead to recoveries in V- or U-shaped form It is also possible to imagine other, more severe scenarios and some of them are already being debated The risk of a "black swan of black swans" can not be excluded: economic disruption to the economy, caused by an ongoing spread of the virus before a vaccine is widely available;

Help workers and protect them in this brave new world. Many organizations have implemented basic protections for their staff and clients. For certain jobs, businesses have implemented no-travel and work-from-home schemes, and for others, physical-distancing-at-work initiatives. The problem is ever-changing. Interruptions are frequenter for remote employees than they are in the workplace. It is hard to separate your mind from a often stressful home life. Workers find that in an extended remote environment, from networking to developing routines that drive efficiency, they don't have the skills to success.