The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted almost every aspect of our lives. What started as a medical challenge that threatened many lives soon evolved into an economic, social, educational and wellbeing threat to most people.
The time is right to start planning for life after the pandemic.
The government has set up a steering group to define a national post-COVID strategy. This is a good initiative.
However, good intentions will not be enough to develop a comprehensive strategy. There is still much, very much, that we do not know about how the medical and economic crisis will evolve in the coming months and even years.
It would help if the steering team, led by academic Simone Borg, published their terms of reference.
This is a national initiative and it should not be a closed process, kept within the confines of a committee of experts. Full transparency would help the public better assess how reliable and realistic will be the conclusions and recommendations that this team will eventually make.
One doubt that many people will raise, for example, is how a national post-novel coronavirus strategy can be defined over the next five months if the scientists themselves cannot reassure us when this pandemic will be behind us.
Like every strategic process, the value of the conclusions reached will be as valid as the robustness of the underlying information on which they are based.
It is to be expected that the strategy team will be inundated by different sectors with information on how they have been affected by the pandemic in the last year. Business will ideally aim for a strong safety net to save them from more economic distress.
However, while many are yearning for a return to normality, many others will question whether it is realistic to expect life in its various aspects to return to what it was like in 2019.
Business lobby groups will understandably continue to make their voices heard about the kind of support they expect from taxpayers to ensure that they continue to exist and preserve employment. But major obstacles undoubtedly lie in any government’s way to provide the enormous resources needed to keep viable businesses going.
The committee will need to be fully cognizant of those obstacles.
The social challenges are perhaps just as daunting.
Thousands of students have had their lives disrupted for at least two academic years, as classroom attendance fell and online education was found wanting.
The post-COVID strategy team will have to take a hard look at what needs to be done to ensure that we do not have a lost generation of young people whose educational development has been severely shaken.
The team must avoid the risk of making aspirational recommendations that may then be weaponised by politicians in the run-up to the next election.
The public wants to hear convincing arguments, based on the expertise of medical, economic and social scientists, about the most realistic measures to help the country deal with the fallout from the pandemic.
Some political leaders often see themselves as cheerleaders to boost the public’s morale that has been shattered by the pandemic’s effects on their lives.
But one hopes the strategy team will be brutally honest about both the positive and negative outlooks post-COVID which emerge from their research.
A strategic process has a beginning but no end. As new developments occur, a strategy has to be calibrated or even redefined completely.
COVID-19 has defied many optimistic forecasts made a year ago. One cannot be surprised if it continues to do so.