It’s a keyhole through which upwards of a third of the U.S. economy must pass to reopen.
Estimates are that between 300,000 and 800,000 Covid-19 tests–many, many of which are “false negatives”–need to occur, daily, to signal the “beginning of the end” of overwhelming economic paralysis caused by the novel coronavirus outbreak.
We need data, bigger data than we’d ever contemplated, to play an important role.
Boston-based scientists on the health and AI front and Harvard Business Review contributors Julie and Neel Shah, offer a clear map of the pathway beyond the immediate Covid plateaus expected in many U.S. communities over the next week or two or three.
“The first step is getting the basics in order. South Korea is producing 100,000 test kits per day, and it has conducted more than 300,000 tests to date. That amounts to more than 40 times the per capita rate of testing in the United States. We need rapid and available testing capabilities. In fact, we needed them some weeks ago; now we must do everything we can to ramp them up as quickly as possible. We also need adequate supplies of personal protective equipment for health care workers and others on the front lines, along with ventilators and other lifesaving treatments. Putting those things in place, in combination with the mitigation measures currently being deployed, including lock downs of entire states, will buy us critical make-up time for deploying data and computers against the virus.”
“The next step is developing smart prevention capabilities rather than requiring blanket isolation and shutdowns. Our window is short — measured in months — for heading off what Bill Gates has characterized as potentially a once-in-a-century pandemic like the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed at least 50 million people around the world. We have many technological advantages over those fighting that pandemic a century ago. In many ways, this is our most meaningful Big Data and analytics challenge so far. With will and innovation, we could rapidly forecast the spread of the virus not only at a population level but also, and necessarily, at a hyper-local, neighborhood level.”
The #flattenthecurve days have by-and-large passed. Community spread of novel coronavirus is now general. Social distancing and lockdowns on business-as-usual activity have proven their mettle in the communities that have fully embraced them. The evidence and proof, however, doesn’t seem to sway behaviors among everyone, everywhere. So the contagion continues–invisible, asymptomatic, except when it isn’t. Then it’s too late.
On the back-face of the Covid-19 curve, home building, design, development, investment, manufacturing, and distribution need a plan. They need to be part of a plan.
Further, they need to design their own part in that plan, or else each group of those businesses and their stakeholders will find themselves downstream of others’ design for them.
Here’s two ways to begin getting at that.
One is to start grappling with what’s a blip and what’s a trend, especially in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic shock to the economy and housing market. Data–real behavioral benchmarks–is critical. This is why Covid-19 Outlook sessions, hosted by my colleague, Meyers Research chief economist Ali Wolf, are important moments to level-set what you’re seeing in your own businesses with a more macro, more in-the-trenches based set of evidence as it twitches and changes and develops in real time.
Early-curve data sets coming from our friends at BDX, indicate that “hot-spot” Covid-19 markets, where dense populations have been battling higher infection and fatality rates, correlate with more robust new-home search activity, suggesting that people may be looking for safe haven living in new suburban communities in the wake of the outbreak.
BDX chairman and ceo Tim Costello notes: “we saw this week, increased interest coming from the markets that are highly impacted (Seattle, Philly, Detroit). It seems people are wanting to abandon the urban space, condos and apartments and relocate to suburban single family homes. I don’t know if this trend will last but it is fascinating!’
Blip or trend?
Thanks to “recency effect” thinking, we may think that the pandemic is causing people to want to evacuate denser areas. Demographer William Frey begs to differ. The Brookings Institution fellow writes:
“In the past few weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to some big-city residents relocating to summer homes and other less dense places in the hopes of avoiding the coronavirus. While this is a temporary phenomenon in response to a crisis, recently released Census Bureau statistics reveal such relocations dovetail with a longer-term, national dispersal away from large metropolitan area populations. This is a reversal from the early 2010s, which witnessed an unusually large growth surge for many of the nation’s biggest metropolises and cities.
As big-city growth continued through mid-decade, many observers, including myself, heralded the 2010s as “the decade of the city.” However, the new Census Bureau estimates documenting annual population change through July 2019 make plain that any decade-wide growth for large metro areas and urban cores is heavily front-loaded from the beginning of the decade, as growth has diminished in recent years.
Now, of course, this may come as music to the ears of greenfield masterplan developers and the builders who partner with them, and that’s fine. It’s just that understanding the data, and the root motivators and causes, is important so as not to misconstrue a long-term structural shift as a sudden reaction to a health crisis. So, tune-in today to Ali’s weekly Covid-19 Outlook sessions.
The other post-plateau challenge is cash. For an analogy, we only need to reach so far as the lead of this story. Test-and-trace. Just as test-and-trace is an essential gateway to re-igniting trillions of dollars of economic activity–25% of GDP–that have been put into an intentionally-induced coma, so too, is the case with the U.S. legal tender right now.
Every U.S. dollar that any firm can put its hands on–from revolver loans, new CARES act SBA programs, industry sector-bailouts, paycheck protection programs, individual unemployment, forbearance, suspension of discretionary spending, stop-payments for vendors, etc. whatever it may be–must be “tested-and-traced” nine-ways to Sunday to ensure it’s going to get used the right way in the months ahead.
Every cash dollar will have six-to-10 stakeholders lined up to lay claim to it, to call for validation, explanation, justification, etc. And for every individual, organization, community, and society who feels they have a valid claim to each one of those dollars, data and evidence will be crucial forces in sustaining the most important currency of all: trust.
On the back-face of the Covid-19 curve, trust will need to offset the shortage of cash. Will trust hold up? One can only hope. A Pew Research analysis gives us reason for both hope and doubtl
[Our] survey finds that about a third of Americans (35%) register low levels of trust in other people, compared with 29% who are “high trusters” and 32% who are “medium trusters.”
Survey responses versus actual behavior under real-life experiences may vary. We’ll see.
