I had an early dental appointment this morning and noticed even at 630am the traffic was busier than it has been the last several weeks. Our county is in Phase 1 of its gradual re-opening.
I have been doing Zoom interviews with many C level executives around the country. They are all talking about prudent opening of their facilities. They will continue with work from home wherever possible. Where physical locations need to be open ensure distancing, temperature checks, enhanced hygiene routines.
Ray Lane in one of those interviews said "..look if we are going up the open up our economy again the responsibility now transfers from the government to us...Get out ...get back to work... bring all of these great technologies that we have seen during the COVID crisis ..bring them forward. I think you can operate in the month of May being socially responsible but let's get the economy going again."
We have already seen early signs of changes in workplace routines and hygiene. I wrote about those at Costco 5 weeks ago here. As of today, they have had many other process changes including requiring customers and employees to wear masks in their stores.
Amazon has procured so far more than 31,000 thermometers and 1,115+ thermal cameras, 100 million masks, 48 million ounces of hand sanitizers among other protective measures for its workplaces.
OSHA has guidelines for re-opening manufacturing plants. In an interview last week, Plex executives told me they have been facilitating a number of customer conversations about shop floor level safety protocols.
Cushman and Wakefield has a concept called the "6 feet office" for when people return to physical offices from their work from home settings
The NYC subway is going to be much more sanitary in the future.
Similarly when we start flying again we will find most US airplanes require passengers to wear masks, will reconfigure seats, change boarding processes, disinfect planes early and often. International flights will likely need temperature checks and health certificates. We may also see concepts like Glassafe that Aviointeriors has developed - a Plexiglass like screen to cocoon passengers, to separate them from their neighbors.
Designers like Yves Behar are thinking further ahead. "Providing a sanitary safe environment will become standard in office design, with surface materials that are anti-microbial, security robots like Cobalt (which we designed), daily deep cleans, non-touch gestural interfaces, and more personal space. Office design is always changing, and this is a new opportunity to design for maximum health: a physical and mental wellbeing approach of the most precious asset of any business—its people,"
Salesforce is offering a site called Work.com to allow for collaboration to help safely reopen your workplace.
A final request as we re-open the economy. Focus on your own community, not giving advice to others. I posted this rant in social media on behalf of my state last week
"No other state is more respectful of computer models than FL courtesy of the National Hurricane Center. I have written case studies about the satellites, buoy sensors, Hurricane Hunter flights and other data capture tech and the supercomputers used to create track models.
Floridians are pretty systematic about our evacuations. There are escape routes clearly marked in every town. Toll roads become free. Our utilities start moving equipment to likely where the landfall will happen. FEMA is on standby. Neighbors help each other - they will make sure the elderly are ok. People walk around with chainsaws to help with fallen tree limbs.
If anything, every state should have applied our script in reverse for their CV19 lockdown. We have very few panic attacks unlike the chaos we have seen around this.
Here's the irony. We were told we were fxxked because we were not listening to the IHME and other CV19 models. Now that those models say our peak passed over a week ago, we are being told ignore the models, stay shut down. As of now we are only at 52 CV19 fatalities per million - compare to the NY/NJ/CT area which is at over 2300!
But, wait we have Florida Man so we are country bumpkins - what do we know?"
End of rant :)
Re-open your communities smartly. We all have lots and lots of work to do in the next few months - let's mirror the many smart folks who are working feverishly on vaccines, antibody tests, contact tracing and other innovations which will gradually make us feel safer and safer.
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