August 24, 2021
This summer, Europe has seen some good days after a long winter of strict lockdowns and unsettling news reporting higher and higher numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths every day. Numbers and data may vary from one source to another; but we know that about 25% of the world population is now fully vaccinated, while more than 30% has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. As vaccines started to appear in the market right after Christmas 2020, hospitals and clinics around the world have been able to deliver approximately 4.80 billion doses of vaccines in 183 countries. Throughout July and August, many European Union countries have enjoyed the EU Digital COVID Certificate initiative and started traveling again with a bit more relief in the heart.
This year marks the biggest global vaccination campaign in history, with more than 35 million doses delivered every day. While the vaccination state is promising in the USA, Canada, China, Israel, and many European countries, there is still a stark gap between vaccination programs in relatively poorer countries. African, South Asian, and Latin American states are some of the places that are deprived of enough vaccines to be administered to secure national immunity, and they are in need of quick response from international organizations and global donators.
Whether life would turn into how it was before the pandemic is still a big debate heavily discussed from Hong Kong to California and from Helsinki to Sydney. Epidemiologists say that vaccinating 70% to 80% of the world population would enable returning to normal life; and even with the extreme speed of daily vaccinations around the world we have today, reaching global immunity seems to be a long way ahead. Experts also point to the possibility of a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ this Autumn as new variations of the COVID-19 emerge and to the fact that unvaccinated people are in higher danger than the vaccinated.
What do these mean for business life? Should vaccinated people expect a return to the lockdowns and shutting down the offices once again in case of another wave taking over the unvaccinated? How would international businesses get affected by the new world order that is mutating at a high speed? How should organizations get prepared for the noncontinuous type of normal?
Health experts currently predict that a big number of countries may not go into a complete lockdown this year, and call for businesses to initiate their recovery processes by keeping the digitalized habits that the world has built at a higher level during the pandemic. This translates into the fact that despite the emergence of multiple variants of the virus that are more dangerous to human health, governments cannot ignore the incentives taken by millions of people getting vaccinated and force them into another phase of lockdowns. British PM Boris Johnson underlined that UK’s intentions lay on imposing no further lockdown after July 19th – the British ‘Freedom Day’ for the “irreversible” removal of restrictions. An infectious disease expert from the U.S. has also called for public attention to the fact that ‘things are going to get worse’ with the spread of the Delta variant, yet not bad enough to get into the situation we were in last winter. Yet, many people are subconsciously considering the possibility of waking up to the news informing about the new restrictions imposed on a late-September morning, as they have experienced the unpredictability of things with the pandemic.
This calls for more than a hope-for-the-best strategy for this Autumn, and means that to protect their businesses, organizations may need to keep their hybrid or remote habits gained through the hard way for a little longer. Many organizations share the same opinion about this. At an open poll that we published on GlobalBSG’s LinkedIn page earlier this month, 70% of our European audience responded that they expect another lockdown in a month or two, they do not expect the global immunity to come around in less than one year, and they plan to keep their out-of-office working habits around. Many sectors working remotely these days have expressed varying results regarding their businesses’ productivity levels with remote work – while some thrived, some languished. In order to avoid pitfalls if (or when) new restrictions appear in your news headlines, we advise our businesses partners to make use of their so-far experience with dealing with the pandemic at work: Putting health and safety first, reaching out to employees, showing flexibility and incentive, closely watching over to the company finances, adapting to digitalization as much as possible, are some of the ways we can follow at any stake to make sure that we produce sustainable solutions against risks and challenges
