What’s ahead in the second year of Covid-19?

‘When COVID-19 began its insidious march across the globe more than a year ago, it disrupted every industry and forced fast innovation as business leaders worked to adjust to a new world order. Last year, in Wharton’s Fast Forward video series, several of the School’s faculty offered their insight into what the second half of 2020 would look like during the pandemic. That insight is needed even more this year as the ground keeps shifting, vaccines are rolled out, and new coronavirus mutations emerge.

‘Much has changed since the start of the pandemic, from consumer behavior to health care delivery to working from home. What changes are lasting? And what lessons have we learned? We’ve asked some of our faculty to analyze what’s in store for the rest of 2021. Their responses appear below:

• Will working from home become permanent for nonessential employees?
• What’s the outlook for the stock market and the economy this year?
• How will the pandemic continue to change the delivery of health care in the U.S.?
• What crisis management lessons will business leaders keep going forward?
• What changes in retail and shopping will become permanent?
• What is the future of the gig economy in the U.S.?

Read here (Wharton@Knowledge, Mar 8, 2021) 

Harnessing our humanity — How Washington’s health care workers have risen to the pandemic challenge

‘Given mounting PPE shortages and the rising death toll from Covid-19 among health care workers globally, such scenarios [of protocol modifications -- including the use of bandannas in place of face masks] induce terror and necessitate rethinking of routine standards of care. Should we run to codes of patients with known or suspected Covid-19? Should physicians refuse to intubate a patient unless they have adequate PPE? Should we offer bedside comfort to the elderly patient with possible Covid-19 who becomes increasingly delirious as unrecognizable health care workers speed in and out of the room while TV coverage of the pandemic drones on in the background? The clarion call of the profession — to put our patients’ needs above our own — is far less directive when meeting one patient’s needs may leave us too ill to care for the next.’

Read here (New England Journal of Medicine, May 28, 2020)

Patterns of pain: What Covid-19 can teach us about how to be human

‘Our institutions will need to be rebuilt with transparency, with heart and by learning from the people who have been staffing them, not just the managers and owners. Doctors, nurses, carers and delivery people have things to say about how their institutions could be better run. The body politic and the politics of the bodies that make up our world must be reconfigured, and we need to start thinking about that now.

‘I conclude with Freud: “The aim of psychoanalysis is to turn hysteria into ordinary human unhappiness.” That is an accomplishment for an individual and for a society. We cannot escape unhappiness. It is constitutive of being human, just as are creativity, courage, ambition, attachment and love. Let’s embrace the complexity of what it means to be human in this time of sorrow as we think and feel our way to come out of this, wiser, humbler and more connected.’

Read here (The Guardian, May 7, 2020)