Embracing reality
ON Tuesday, October 20, I will join Manila Times chieftain Dante “Klink” Ang 2nd to moderate the latest in our series of business forums, this time featuring top officials from the Department of Finance, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and World Bank, along with my second- favorite Sheila, real estate powerhouse Ms. Lobien of the eponymous realty group. If you are not doing anything else between 10 a. m. and noon that day — and really, why would you be, with that lineup offering you such a potent opportunity for enlightenment — please tune in to the live broadcast on The Manila Times’ Facebook page or YouTube channel and hear what everyone has to say.
The theme of the forum, “Regroup and Rally: Bouncing Back Better,” is very much the front- of- mind topic for nearly everyone these days, no matter what one’s economic level. From the lowliest itinerant laborer to the largest corporation, government or multilateral institution, everyone has had it just about up to here with this damned pandemic, and desperately wishes to get back to something that, at least, resembles “normal” life and business. Our esteemed guests will, no doubt, from their perspectives offer some substantial food for thought about how we get there from where we are now.
Obviously, that’s an assumption on my part; because I like surprises, I haven’t actually asked any of our speakers what they intend to present. The office of one of them, however, with some politely implied mild apprehension that I found amusing — I apparently have a bit of a reputation with certain organizations — did ask me what I may want to discuss with their principal. As I was only too happy to share those thoughts with them, I might as well share them with everyone else, too.
I believe there are a couple of flaws in our collective approach to this pandemic and what may come after, which are reflected in everyone’s individual behavior toward it, as well as in economic and management strategy. First of all, history strongly suggests that we are very likely not yet at a point where we can shift the balance of thinking from “response to the pandemic” to “recovering from the pandemic.”
The record of modern epidemics or pandemics involving influenza or influenza-like infections tells us several things. One, they last about two years, but the infectious agents that cause them never go away, and become a part of our environment. The viruses (or their descendants) that caused the Spanish flu, the Asian flu, the Hong Kong flu, bird flu, swine flu, SARS and MERS all still exist, and collectively still take out several tens of thousands to several hundreds of thousands of people each year. Thus, we are only about halfway through our present pandemic; part of the reason earlier pandemics lasted for two cycles of seasons instead of just one is that people at the time, just as tired of their situation then as we are of ours now, prematurely pushed for a return to “normalcy.”
But, you might ask, what about the vaccines that are being developed? What about them, indeed; vaccines against influenza or its coronavirus cousins are only moderately effective, if they exist at all, to say nothing of the immense and possibly insurmountable logistical problems of getting a vaccine to a large enough part of the human population to create the so- called herd immunity. The seasonal flu vaccines are considered successful if they have an effectivity of about 50 percent; the early results of testing of the various coronavirus vaccines that have been developed also suggest an effective rate of between 50 and 70 percent.
If that indeed turns out to be the case in actual use of the vaccines, and if their production and distribution proceeds according to realistic expectations ( which are somewhat less rosy than what certain rustic politicians have been trying to sell the public), then the best- case scenario, as described by actual public health experts, puts their widespread availability sometime in the latter half of 2022. Consequently, the point at which the coronavirus will shift from being an actual pandemic to being a more or less “normal” health risk like the flu would happen sometime in 2023.
All of that means that if we are to debate and develop economic and business strategies, we should probably be focusing on “adaptation,” rather than “bouncing back,” as the point at which we could successfully “pick up where we left off” before March of this year is still about three years away. We can look forward, and we should, but even without a pandemic our practical planning horizons are rarely that far in the future, and for good reason; if this year has taught us anything, it is that things can change to an almost unimaginable extent very quickly. The sooner we embrace our economic reality and develop strategies to maximize it, rather than an imagined and unlikely future state, the sooner our “bouncing back” will actually be “better.”