Ingram's April 2023

transmission rates have allowed for the relaxation of anti-infective practices, such as mask-wearing and isolation. The most encouraging, Norman says, is that the nation’s health-care system can take a fresh look at the care model. “Are there better models of team care that allow all providers to work better, at the top of their licenses, differently as a team, utilizing physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, community health workers, and medical assistants?” he said. “Is that also true for (delivery of) care in homes and community locations, technology assisted, as through telemedicine? I think yes.” A primary concern for business is the long-term impacts that continue to dramatically reshape the workforce and the places where people used to work. The ability to work remotely has fundamentally changed recruiting and retention of talent for all business sectors—those whose workers can maintain productivity and those who find it harder to retain or recruit talent as more people insist on the flexibility of remote work. The pandemic created new work force challenges but also exacerbated— even sped up—trends in the workplace before the first U.S. COVID death. Remote and hybrid work may empty 330 million square feet of U.S. office space by 2030, according to a Cushman & Wakefield report earlier this year. With 740 million more square feet likely to become obsolete from non pandemic trends, the nation is looking at a billion-square-foot office-space sur- plus within seven years. Put in starker terms, that report warned that the 12 percent office va cancy rate of pre-pandemic 2019 could surge by more than half to 18 percent. Lessons Learned—and Not Looking back, Norman believes a clearer picture has emerged regarding opportunities lost amid the crisis response. The notion that “science would carry the day was errant thinking,” he says. “Necessary and helpful, yes, but half of Americans chose not to believe or follow experts. On top of that, the speed of response was inadequate, exposing a disjointed nationwide patch-

work of response frameworks and jur isdictional authorities. Research findings—especially about masks—were often at odds with each other, further undermining public confidence, and political differences drowned out the voices of researchers, clinical experts, and public health authorities. Political fault lines shifted further amid online conspiracy theories fom ented by partisans of every stripe. It didn’t help boost confidence, for exa- mple, for candidate Joe Biden to declare weeks before the 2020 election that he couldn’t trust a vaccine produced during the Donald Trump administra tion, then flatly stated less than a year later that anyone who took the vaccine was “not going to get the virus, not gonna get sick and not gonna die.” Looking back, the metrics would belie each of those claims. Looking forward, health-care ex ecutives are hopeful that the pandemic response has generated momentum that can be sustained to improve mes saging and processes for the next big danger lurking out there. “It brought many federal, state, and county respondents together for the first time, and the partners often times did work together well,” Norman

said. “When a disaster occurs, it is not a great time to be exchanging business cards for the first time.” Some good news: At this point in the viral cycle, the nation’s population generally has natural immunity as well as vaccine-induced immunity to CO VID, said Dana Hawkinson, chief of infection control at The University of Kansas Hospital. A defensive posture looking down the road, he said, “con tinues to be about preparation and pre vention—doing all these things to help prepare for new issues, but also preven tion and testing and all that work on the front end. That will save you a lot on the back end.” The nation will be better armed if another COVID variant hits, Hawkin son said, now that pharmaceutical companies have been able to roll out treatments that can be given at the on set of symptoms. Those have already proven they can vastly reduce the need for hospitalization, and in cases where hospital admission is required, stave off the worst of COVID’s effects. “What we can do to prepare for the next pandemic,” Hawkinson said, “includes infrastructure for surveillance, resources to help research and development of new vaccines as well as potential therapeutics.”

20

I ngr am ’ s

April 2023

Ingrams.com