What you know–and what you don’t know–about construction workplace health and safety can hurt you, others, ones you rely on, ones you love. That knowledge, or lack of it, can hurt today, and it can hurt tomorrow. If you want to be sure to have all the information you need for the smartest decisions about the safety of your team, your customers, and yourselves during these tricky weeks ahead, join us for our #BuildersAreEssential episode 4, “Site Safety, Mid-COVID-19,”
“He’s doing it again.” Some of you may be thinking that, as I write about face masks, and new rules, and COVID-19, and my wife, who’s a doctor specializing in infectious disease.
I’ve been doing it pretty much non-stop–and to the exclusion of any and every other subject area about home building and construction–since March 4. That’s 54 days and counting. I’ll admit, it’s hard for me to think of much else these days, although, I’ve got news for you. No one would rather think about, focus on, celebrate, report on, or instruct you about subject areas other than the novel coronavirus outbreak and its health and economic effects than I.
I plan to do so–to open back up to subject matter whose purpose is to help builders build better buildings, built better–when we’ve reached the end of the beginning of the crisis.
Trouble is, how will we know the beginning has ended? Fifty or 60 days since the reckoning moment, the pandemic, it’s hard to tell. Until it’s clear we’ve reached that point, safety and health, of people and the economy, are about all I can think of to care about or focus on.
Some journalists can do the math of all this. It’s not a point of personal pride, but that part of the job doesn’t come second nature to me, as it does for gifted “data journalists” I admire. Some people are fluent in a second or third spoken language, and can actually think in that language’s vocabulary, idioms and all. For people like Bill Gates, thinking mathematically is like language fluency. Orders of magnitude, rates and ratios, first and second derivatives are instinctual cognitive building blocks. They’re like contemplating life’s riddles and wonders in French to me.
When Bill Gates thinks about “the end of the beginning,” what comes to his mind without missing a beat is a mathematical construct–the reproduction rate, or RO. He writes:
“R0 is hard to measure, but we know it’s below 1.0 wherever the number of cases is going down and above 1.0 wherever the number of cases is going up. And what may appear to be a small difference in R0 can lead to very large changes.”
Builders are doing a lot of math in their minds these days.
- Backlog math focuses on managing all pre-sales through to settlement, delivering both the work in process unit and the buyer to the finish line amid conditions that have gone considerably wobbly since orders and deposits came in and vertical construction began.
- Overheads math focuses on expense structures gauged–until 45 days or so ago–for 2020 volumes 20%, or 30%, or 40% greater than they’re going to be. Now, they’re overweight given the unit and profit margins flowing through them.
- Land math focuses on the cash cost of the carry of lots that will absorb at rates that–at some yet to be determined level–will not match up to prior expectations. Capital lenders and finance sources are all, in some ways or other, feeling squeezed between the rock of money that’s not flowing into their coffers, and the hard place of what they owe investors. Policymakers have made more noise than they have produced signals as to their support for the daisychain of capital that either continues to breathe life into home builders, or chokes off their oxygen supply.
It’s all about trying to get whether the beginning has ended. If the end of the beginning is here, then conditions, challenges, urgencies, and a constructive path forward all become clearer. Adversity, in the end, winds up being a less menacing foe than uncertainty laced with doubt.
At the beginning of the beginning, because of the rife-shot onset of the COVID-19 outbreak and the geographical and business sector compartmentalization of meltdown, two camps sprang up. Panic ruled one camp; it had its own RO–reproduction rate–and it’s been in second-derivative mode, at either above 1.0 or below 1.0 ever since. Most of the contrasts in panic levels above or below 1.0 correlate to locations or business sectors that are in COVID-19 hot spots, or not. The other camp sighed relief–perhaps prematurely–because neither the COVID curve nor Wall Street’s meltdown fixed their full-force hazards upon them.
All we can say is that, with 30, 60, or 90 days left of either COVID RO being below 1.0 or above it in Main Streets near you–depending on whom you believe for your public health and medical insight these days–we hope, the end of the beginning is at least near.
Not being of the type for whom the math comes as second nature, I tend to think of the end of the beginning in other than algebraic or calculus terms.
My wife, for instance, set out to work one morning this week in the COVID-19 wards of one of the Central New Jersey hospitals. Like all of us, she’s been heartened of late, to see the number of new COVID admissions start to shrink, gradually, but steadily.
This particular morning, however, she was glum. It would have been understandable if it were the about exhaustion. Of the 54 days we talked about since March 4, she’d had four days off. COVID patient cases at the three hospitals she rounds at shot from a few at that time to the high-200s. Now, as those COVID cases shrink to below 100, the adrenaline reserves, you’d imagine, may be down to fumes.
Why was she down that morning? She was down because the masks–the N95 “duckbill” style masks builders had given tens of thousands of in March–had run out. Too, an almost unimaginable low point for a clinical specialist in infectious diseases, her hospital had run so low on protective gowns that health-caregivers, nurses and doctor and technicians, were now required to wear a single gown all day. Not even the end of April, and PPE, a necessity to try to keep healthcare givers and their patients as safe and health as we can, is hitting the bottom of the barrel even though infection rates are still at unacceptable levels.
She’d been double-masking with a duckbill and a surgical mask. Hospital staff told her they had a small stash of molded-style face masks. They’d “fit test” the molded mask by placing a hood over her head and then forcing air into the hood to see whether the molded mask properly filtered out air particulates.
“No thank you,” she said. She was discouraged because, here we are, finally reaching the point where COVID case loads at the hospitals she serves are starting to decline rather than increase, but the risk to healthcare givers–and, in turn, their patients, family members, and the community they live in–remains intense.
Will we truly be at “the end of the beginning” if we haven’t begun to solve for masks and other protective gear to keep essential workers–and all participants in our essential economic complex–healthy and safe?
At the end of the beginning of COVID’s curse, word is we can roll back “the cure,” which has been a trade-off from hell, shutting down a third of the economy to stem the spread from plus 1.0 to below 1.0. We feel the pain and anguish and cost of necessity to do so. Worldwide economies–on pace to lose $9 trillion in economic activity due to the systemic consequences of both the pandemic and economic lockdowns that came with it–are wracking up financial and economic damages at a rate of $142,000 for every second that passes.
That’s why healthcare givers need their masks. Masks and other PPE are by no means flowing into the supply chain as they need to be, not even to healthcare givers on the frontline.
That’s why we have to send builders to work–in factories, in supply and distribution chain roles, on job sites–with the protective gear they need, and the protection of distanced processes, and the protection of readily-available hand-washing stations, and the protection of testing and reducing potential community spread in the workplace, and the protection of schedules that limit workers to precisely managed task flow.
Think of seat belts. Seat belts have been around, according to claims by Volvo, for 171 years, the first lap-belts for almost 90 years of that, and the first 3-point seat-restraint systems, 61 years, again per Volvo. It would be another dozen years, from 1958 to 1970 before seat belts became standard gear, and another almost 15 years after that before the first seat-restraint regulations cropped up.
It was the late-1980s before mandatory seat belt use became “a thing,” and 1997, after laws, hundreds of millions of dollars in public safety advertising, and massive education outreach, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that seat-belt use crested to 68%.
The CDC estimates that from 1975 to the present, upwards of 450,000 lives being saved–15,000 a year–owe themselves to 85% seat belt use among U.S. vehicle users.
Now, if it took six decades-plus and untold advertising and education investment dollars to get cars properly equipped, and people properly compliant–except for the 15% who don’t feel seat belts are essential when they drive or ride–what’s it going to take to get workplaces and people equipped and trained to change their behavior and its outcomes in residential construction?
If doctors and nurses are running short on masks and protective gear, how can we think we can equip our team members properly in the Mid-COVID-19 workplace?
We may think we’ve heard everything we need to hear, that we know everything we need to know about workplace and job site health and safety. That can and will come back to haunt you if you don’t open up to learning, to practicing, and to insisting on safer, healthier, more rigorous workflows on your sites as the economy reboots.
Join us, would you, and be part of the solution to one of the critical challenges of the end of the beginning–getting everybody, everyone, every person, every individual, to practice safe and healthy building as the economy opens back up, and your essential work results in our new homes and communities? Register for the Monday, April 27, at 5 pm ET webinar here. It’s 45 minutes that can help you tell when we’ve reached the end of the beginning.
