Preparing for the Future!

What if lockdown 2.0… Due to whatsoever calamity)

The recent corona virus pandemic has got every administration, every authority around the world, thinking on its feet. They have been facing unprecedented challenges while reviving the economy with the looming fears of community spread of the virus.

Even though the Spanish flu happened at least a hundred years ago, it wasn’t a lesson enough for mankind to build up on a system or even an alternate theory to continue with daily operations in case a new virus with an unknown mortality rate and an unbelievably fast transmission rate hits the population again.

Economies all over the world have reached a point that people believed, couldn’t be possible unless a third world war broke. If outside is a problem, so is the inside. On one hand the poor, the daily wage worker has run out of work and thus, everyday bread has become a problem, on the other, a dangerous increase has been reported in the cases of domestic violence, divorce cases and mental health disordersin households all over the world.

All of this inspires us to think of a better response to such calamities in the future.

God forbid, but such a calamity is inevitable. With over 85% of the species on earth still unknown to the human kind, according to national geographic, unknown are the in-borne flus, infections that are passable to the homosapiens. But we, as an intelligent species, and the one freshly hit by such a virus, should have the ability to build better response systems to such a calamity in future.

Now, the above would require a lot of brain-wreaking as we are talking of demolishing and building all the social and economic systems from scratch. Some of the basic things are listed below:

• Sanitization and perpetual cleanliness: the need of sanitization was quite evident once the WHO warned the governments about a new type of transmittable virus. This has to be made a regular part of everybody’s lives to ensure safety from the present and/or future flus.
• Change in investments and thus, job markets: the sole dependence on online products for many of us to maintain social distancing was there for all of us to see. For an instance, In addition to giants like Amazon, Flipkart and BigBasket, home delivering groceries, franchisees such as dominos, zomato added the same onto their app catalogues. Even Mother dairy partnered with Askme for doorstep delivery of fruits and milk. Maybe this is the way forward, we have to develop such platforms to lessen the everyday trips of people to nearby stores. The skill building will go online as well. As this will create job opportunities in that market, this will not be at the cost of livelihoods.
• Online help centres: though there are quite a few of these already, they aren’t advertised enough. Matters such as marriage counselling, reporting of domestic violence, etc. may be quite embarrassing to some, sharing these from home might be very helpful and, in most cases the only way anything comes out from them.

This is where, skill building plays a very important role. If we plan on turning the market on its head, the job structure and everything, we need to build the required skills. we could even work on our passion to just have something to fall upon and also, the other benefits.