What I learned in the Year of COVID

It was the year of COVID! I remember last year, at the beginning of March, I was thinking how bad a year it was for Basketball; Kobe was killed a month prior, and people were still in mourning. My Golden State Warriors, after dominating the NBA for several seasons, were in last place. I was looking forward to watching Star Trek Picard on Thursdays. Oh, and the media was (as usual) overhyping this thing called the Coronavirus. The media does tend to overhype this kind of thing: killer storms turning into drizzles, The Y2K bug, The African Killer Bees ... That is the media's job to scare the bejesus out of us all over some exaggerated disaster that would eliminate all life on earth. In the year of COVID, though, they were actually under-hyping it. COVID 19 would end up altering our very reality. Thus far, it has taken over half a million lives, instantly transformed one of the most prolonged periods of economic growth in America to that of a deep recession. Sporting events have been canceled, restaurants closed down, and movie theaters empty. People began working from home. My mother fell down and needed skilled nursing. She was there alone for a month and passed away a few weeks after she got home. My mother-in-law and father-in-law both had COVID and were both put on ventilators, my mother-in-law not making it through.  Only in my deepest nightmares would I have thought up a scenario that has been the Year of COVID. As we come to the tail-end (I hope), I have begun to reflect on what it meant for me. I think that something can be a curse as well as a blessing.

In the Year of COVID, you don't need Physical contact with people to be a community

During the pandemic, I have created communities with people I would have never met in person. I have taken to meeting with people on Zoom and have at least 4 organizations I have joined. I am on Zooms, interacting with people hours a day with people I didn't even know before the pandemic. Some of these people are my neighbors that I never talked to and now do regularly. I am building businesses and helping others who I have never actually met to achieve their dreams 

In the Year of COVID, you solve medical problems with medicine, not with politics

I know several medical doctors. ALL of them have said that the way to slow down the spread of COVID is to social distance and wear masks. Yet, a certain percentage of the population refuses to do so because a particular politician with a background in Business, NOT Medicine, told them they didn't need to. This politician also told his followers to drink bleach to be cured. He knows nothing about medicine, and his advice should be put on the trash heap of bad ideas. Politicians should deal with politics and allow medical decisions to be made by doctors. Had this politician just kept his damned mouth shut, my mother-in-law and several thousand others might still be alive.

In the Year of COVID, just because it is on the internet does not mean it is true.

I read on Twitter that Doctor Harry Vanderspeigle said that if you drink lots of coffee and watch Law and Order reruns, you will be shielded against COVID... Harry Vanderspeigle is an alien posing as a doctor on the TV show resident alien, played by Alan Tudyk. It is a hilarious TV Show, but Alan is hardly an expert on infectious diseases. This sounds absurd, but it is incredible how many people get their medical advice from You-Tube and other social media. There is a process to publish scientific articles known as peer review. Peer Review is required to publish in scientific journals. Neither Twitter, Facebook, You-Tube, nor for that matter Tic-Tock require peer review. Anyone can post without any peer review. Get your medical advice from qualified physicians, not aliens in Colorado

Life can change drastically at a moment's notice

I was working as a substitute teacher in a local high school district. I was teaching a special-ed science class. I had recently completed my Ph.D. in Organisational Development, having written my dissertation on Working from Home. I had put myself through grad school doing substitute teaching. Still, I was finished and looking for something that would better utilize my talents. A Ph.D. is a little overqualified to work at a job babysitting high school students. Then the notice came over the loudspeakers: the school would be shut down for three weeks. Those three weeks, so far, have been a year, and no work as to when schools would reopen. I took the opportunity to transform myself into Dr. Work from Home and realize my vision of closer families and a cleaner environment. Our hand was forced in the matter of working from home. Who here would have ever thought that would happen?

In the Year of COVID, human beings can work together to achieve common goals.

Despite the barriers, businesses are continuing. We are working together. I work with several fine organizations to support each other in attaining our mutual goals. It has always been that to accomplish anything significant and lasting requires a team. Without the Apple team, Steve Jobs would have lived his life as some Doc Brown type of crackpot with these wild ideas. Give him a team, and he revolutionizes the world. The COVID Crises gave us more and more enormous barriers to face. Only by working together can we dissolve the obstacles that we were facing

In the Year of COVID, sometimes you need to have the government take charge

I had always been a die-hard libertarian; I thought that the private sector should be left to solve all problems. In "normal" times, that is true, but when there is something like war or a pandemic, our survival depends on our actions being aligned. As incompetent as government can be, it is the only structure that can take unpopular measures to solve the situation. It was the government that put together the vaccine effort and government loans that kept companies in business. Now, didn't I say before that politicians should not be dispensing medical advice. Right, government action on that should be, "listen to your doctor."

It doesn't have to take years to get something done.

It usually takes 10 to 15 years to develop and bring a vaccine to market. For COVID, it was less than a year. It doesn't necessarily take years and years to do something. What if we had put that same effort into eradicating Cancer as we did to eliminating COVID. In 2020, about 400,000 people died from COVID, yet nearly 606,590 died of Cancer. If we were to put the urgency we put into COIVID into Cancer, we could eradicate that as well, The world has changed considerably in the past year due to COVID. I have faced tragedy this past year but have also learned many lessons. I am grateful that it appears the worst is behind us, and I am also thankful for the lessons I have learned. Here's to a better world!   To learn more about Dr. Work from Home: Click Here Schedule your strategy session here