The next normal

On Easter Sunday I finally saw three relatives who had stayed at home throughout the enhanced community quarantine.

While we swapped news and stories about our quarantine experiences, there were no more hugs, cheek bussing or even taps on the shoulder in greeting. Although we didn’t wear masks at their home, we kept a virus-safe distance from each other.

When this pandemic is over, I wonder if we’ll ever return to our beso-beso and other touchy-feely ways of greeting each other. Or will we follow the example of the Japanese and Koreans, and simply bow to each other in greeting? The depth of the bow is in inverse proportion to the level of respect for the other person.

Bowing is certainly more hygienic. But I read somewhere that humans need physical contact at least once a day with other warm-blooded creatures for general well-being. If you can’t hug a fellow human being, you can touch dogs, cats or other mammals.

This is obviously more difficult these days, with even cats and dogs reportedly being infected with COVID by their humans.

Wearing masks in public may become the norm for many, even outside East Asia. Since the SARS epidemic, I’ve seen many travelers from China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong wearing masks everywhere they go – on planes and ships, at airports, tourist spots, parks and shopping malls. I always thought it was overacting, but now I’ll probably be wearing a mask in public for at least a year. And non-Asians won’t find it silly. In fact they might frown at the sight of my Tsinoy face not covered with a mask.

Mikko Gozalo, a Filipino data scientist based in Hong Kong, said wearing masks, combined with widespread and efficient mass testing, isolation and quarantine capabilities as well as early implementation of social distancing spared the special administrative region from a lockdown, even if Hong Kong is just within spitting distance of the Chinese mainland.

Like Taiwan, the public health emergency measures were institutionalized in Hong Kong after it was ravaged by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, believed to have originated in China’s Guangdong province. Between March 11 and June 6, 2003 alone, Hong Kong recorded 1,750 SARS cases, with 286 deaths.

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Gozalo talked to us yesterday on the special COVID episode of “The Chiefs.” Yes, our daily show is back on Cignal TV’s One News channel, but by livestreaming from our homes or offices. Thanks to user-friendly StreamYard, even a low-tech person like myself can connect to the studio from my home.

Millions of students also face the prospect of online learning in the next school year, the opening date of which remains uncertain.

Education Secretary Leonor Briones, another guest on our show yesterday, assured us that public schools have sufficient computers to allow online learning. The problem is internet connectivity, which is reportedly available for only about 48 percent of the public school system.

Briones, who recently tested negative for COVID and has been working from home, says that online learning is the wave of the future in education. So the education department, she stresses, has been preparing for this wave, acquiring the necessary equipment, training educators and implementing certain online learning programs.

The possibility of more pandemics emerging in the coming years gives urgency to such preparations for what is being described as the next normal.

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People, for example, are taking a closer look at the Telecommuting Act of 2018, Republic Act 11165, for possibilities of permanent work-from-home arrangements.

With people opting to work from home, delivery services could see a boom – something we are seeing now. Motorcycle riders delivering mostly food items are increasingly returning to the streets of Metro Manila.

Together with telecommuting, telemedicine could see a boom. In China several years ago, I watched a demonstration of robotic surgery being directed online by a doctor from his office hundreds of kilometers away.

With health workers bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 infection, people are taking a closer look at online medical consultations. In our country, this is already being done for free amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but on a very limited scale.

The Data Privacy Act of 2012 or RA 10173 may have to be reviewed and adjusted when public health and personal privacy issues clash. Several people are grieving over the demise of doctors and other health workers who appeared to have been infected by patients who lied about having the disease.

We need to ramp up our contact tracing capability, through apps that can be easily downloaded, allowing close and accurate monitoring of a person’s body temperature and other indications of infection. Such apps are already in use in South Korea and Taiwan.

Globalization practices are being reassessed, as companies see the vulnerabilities of their supply chains. China in particular will feel the impact.

China may be recovering from the COVID contagion, but it is going to feel the pain of supply chain diversification. Companies with operations in China are worried about the serious disruptions they might suffer in case another infectious and deadly disease emerges from that country. Such adjustments particularly in manufacturing supply chains had been happening even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The World Health Organization may love Beijing, but US President Donald Trump isn’t the only one on the planet who thinks that after the SARS epidemic, early transparency and accurate information from China about COVID-19 could have saved lives, allowed countries to prepare better, and eased the economic tsunami that is rampaging across the globe.

One good thing that could emerge from this pandemic (we hope) is that next time, we will be better prepared to deal with a public health and economic disaster.