Still Early Days
The frog paddled back and forth, back and forth.
It was only then that he realised it had got too hot and in that moment it was too late to act.
He had found the steam captivating.
It's hard to know whether its’ complacency born from normalcy bias or if we are just overreacting to the emerging CoVid situation.
There are foreboding signals:
The supermarket shelves are still empty, people telling others not to be selfish hoarding food and groceries. Themselves not making sense of these intuitive instincts emerging at scale in a collapsing system.
We are beginning to see the problems and solutions scaling. The map below shows the virus outbreaks. Still pretty clear in our region so there’s no reason for the impact to feel proximate, the first celeb and this becomes real for everyone.
Where there is one, in a week there could be many.
There are groups & platforms emerging (https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/), opportunities to connect local with professional networks, sensible preparatory steps. Turning problem and information flow into insight and solution will be key to fuelling the fires of evolution.
Over the course of this year, we will all be affected by this in ways we could never imagine. The numbers are growing and each outbreak is likely to have others around it, the best we can hope for is small explosions caught by an early warning system.
Responding quickly to and making sense of data is one of our most immediate strengths in this war of attrition. A first sensible step would be for the government and NHS Digital to work with pharmacies to begin a drive to capture the daily and hourly temperature of the nation.
The tech for this is simple and would enable enrichment of existing metrics with probable data. Building solutions as services would mean the picture can be further enhanced as new data needs are identified.
We must work at scale in our response to this virus, if we work at pace we can limit its impact, one which will be felt for many years to come.
We must bring to bear innovative solutions to solve the many challenges we will soon face. In Italy, the elderly are finding cash is scarce as they have a shortage of bank cards. Could we find ourselves drifting into this problem, have we asked our tech sector to help Monzo & Starling Developers ?
