The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
LAMONT’S ROAD OUT OF CRISIS
Gov: ‘We’re going to be better and smarter’ after it’s all over
Gov. Ned Lamont, like most elected leaders, sees the future with optimism. His view of where we’ll be in a few years, shaped by the coronavirus crisis, is no exception.
“We’re going to learn from this pandemic and the pain and the crisis, and I think we’re going to be better and smarter for it. And I think Connecticut will be better off for it,” Lamont said Friday.
We talked about the future a week after Hearst Connecticut Media rolled out “The Road Ahead: Life After COVID-19.”
The future is about readiness as much as vision, of course, and in that spirit, I asked Lamont to weigh in on some of the predictions in the pages of last Sunday’s edition — in education, economic security, voting, food-buying, health care, race relations, how we work, and Lamont’s business background, communications technology.
“What would be a real tragedy, if we don’t learn from this, if we go back to the same old ways, that we don’t understand the importance of public health for our future,” Lamont said.
For example, Lamont agrees with the experts who told my colleague Rob Ryser that nursing homes will be leaner and more like hospitals, offering higher levels of critical care.
“One of the reasons we got hit hard is we’re close to New York, another is we’re old, and another is, we were more likely to have people living in nursing homes than just about
every state in the country,” Lamont said.
“I think that’s a big mistake financially, it’s a big mistake for grandma, she prefers to be at home if there’s any way we can come up with a financial system that works. And now with COVID we realize it’s not the best from a public health point of view as well.”
So, fundamental change is coming in nursing homes, which have seen 60 percent of all coronavirus deaths in Connecticut. “Nursing homes will focus on acute care and anybody else who is able to stay at home, we’re more likely to make it possible for them to do so.”
As with a lot of the changes we outlined, making it happen is something else altogether, fraught with pressure to keep things the way they are. Lamont, a pragmatic optimist, sees those pressures, for exmaple, in regional cooperation between towns.
Before we get to that explosive subject, let’s revisit the past, last August in a charter boat on Lake Ontario with Lamont and his host, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. While trolling for steelheat trout, they kicked around threats that could shut down their states.
“We talked a lot about cyber
security,” Lamont said “And then all of a sudden COVID happens.”
That’s the nature of predicting. Lamont was naturally thinking about an electronic infrastructure attack, with his background in digital telecommunications.
But, to repeat, the future is about readiness, not accuracy.
The economy looms biggest of those threats right now, after health. The picture was mixed in our pages as several economists warned of a difficult recovery for Connecticut. Lamont agrees with that.
“What I see is terror in people’s eyes. It’s sort of like the Great Depression,” he said — from firsthand experience handing out food at Rentschler Field in East Hartford. “You look at them and you realize they had a pretty good job up until six weeks ago and they’re sitting in a pretty decent car but they worked paycheck to paycheck and now they’re waiting on line two hours to get some potatoes and onions and some dairy products.
“What I think is that people are going to put a real premium on economic security,” he said.
That means families may save more and spend less, as Hearst business writer Alex Soule reported, as we saw after the Great Depression. But it also means, in the optimistic view, a new spirit of cooperation that I wrote about in a debate with fellow columnist Colin McEnroe — utopia vs. dystopia.
Which way will we go? I cited Yale economist and Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller musing over the possibility that we’ll see policies and market changes that reach toward income equality — even in the richest state, where we have more than our share of the super-rich.
“My hunch is rather than taking people down, I think you’ll see a new emphasis about economic security, a new emphasis about the safety net, a new emphasis upon health care that takes care of everybody and takes care of those racial inequities,” Lamont said. “That’s part of a safety net that’s going to
be newly important going forward.”
Quickly, he made it clear we’re not talking about some kind of Shangri-La, that progress is slow.
Lamont, as the governor, sees the state’s strengths in a post-coronavirus world.
Take office space and how we work. Experts told our reporters we’ll see less dense workplaces with not only more telecommuting, but radically different kinds of video conferencing, involving avatars and other forms of virtual reality.
“It is happening, my God, look how Zoom has taken over our lives,” he said. “Pretty soon you will be in that room with them remotely. And by the way, people will be a lot less likely to jump into an airplane where the air doesn’t circulate than they were two years ago.”
We do make airplane engines and other aerospace components here, so that could be a worry, too. But back to the office environment, a combination of more remote work and proximity to the biggest cities could help this state.
“That’s all good for Connecticut because all of a sudden I can be in Bethel, Barkhamsted or Putnam and I can be in that conference room in midtown Manhattan or wherever I need to electronically,” Lamont said.