Tag Archives: pandemic

Cosmic Horror, Pandemics, and Allergies

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A few days ago a YouTuber Brian David Gilbert posted a video called Teaching Jake about the Camcorder, Jan ’97, which I’ve embedded below. This video has been sitting with me since it came out. In the video BDG plays a father teaching his son how to use an “expensive” camcorder, it feels like a fairly generic period video. However, when Jake, which given the perspective of the video is the viewer, rewinds or fast forwards Father changes facial hair. Some times his affect changes, but most of the time he does an excellent job maintaining the illusion of the same repeated video, as if Father has forgotten that he already taught Jake how to use the camcorder, by saying the same things. Similarly, Jake follows the exact same actions. Eventually, Father talks to Older Jake, the viewer, directly through the camcorder asking him to stop, that he’s gone. Then the figure appears. It’s more of a negative of a figure. It’s an unmoving void of where a figure should be. Given the context it’s safe to assume this is a stand in for whatever killed Father. Later the Father screams at what Jake can only assume to be a stuffed bunny. Father eventually walks out of the room and then out of the house, ending the video presumably to meet his fate.

That figure and the impotence of the Father has sat with me. Partially, the whole creepiness of it. Will I open a door and that figure be there? However, that’s not really why I’ve been thinking about it. There’s an air of inevitability with the piece. It’s happened and seems to be still happening. It’s repeated so perfectly that it fits with how our lives have been during the pandemic. Personally, it hits even closer for me, though. Given my allergies and that every single vaccine has reported allergic reactions. Some severe. It’s always reported, to me anyway, jauntily, that despite the reactions no one has died. Yet.

There’s a dread that creeps in. That figure, that silent absence screams at me. I know I will have a reaction. It’s inevitable. The only question is what will that reaction be like? Will it be like the last time I had ginger? Where my vision constricted within a minute of eating it. Where I started to pour sweat out my pores. Where I could barely talk as I groped for my Prednisone. Eventually going to the ER for shots of Epinephrine and Benadryl.

Would be the tamer almost constant reactions I have to perfumes and chemicals like the Shea Butter lotion my wife used the other day that gave me a slightly tightened throat and a bit of a cough when I smelled it. Or will it be the last time I had Tooth paste where I had a tightened throat, swollen lips, and numbness in my tongue?

Regardless, that void of a figure will be there. I have to step out side to greet that emptiness that unknown. I know the pandemic, that lurking horror hiding behind the stuffed bunny just out of sight, will likely kill me if I get COVID-19. I’ve struggled the past year and a half to express how I’ve been feeling with these allergies during the pandemic. So, despite the horror and fear of my impotence of that empty figure, I must confront it. But like the father, I can do it on my own terms.

Grief, Depression, and Loneliness

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When I was in High school, I was always drawn to The Offspring’s song Gone Away I never really understood why, considering I’d never lost someone the way the narrator had lost someone. Certainly not someone that was close enough to me that I’d want to switch places with them. In a similar vein, I recently read Gideon The Ninth and Harrow The Ninth both by Tamsyn Muir. The first book, Gideon, was suffused with a sense of loneliness, loss, and otherness. There was loss everywhere, it felt like the entire world was dying and decaying in front of the protagonists eyes. While in the second book, Harrow, a direct sequel, it was jarring because the narrator was so unreliable that it’s clear that they were intentionally disassociating rather dealing with her grief.

The music I’ve been listening to during the pandemic has a similar haunted feeling to it. Specifically, Riverside’s Lost (Why should I be frightened by a Hat?) and The Depth of Self Delusion both of these songs are sparse, mournful, and have a strong sense of loss about them. Other songs, like Turn by Magna Carta Cartel describe the anger the futility can days just slipping away.

I got to thinking about these things last night when I read an article in Psychology Today “The Loneliness of Unshared Grief” which talks about the grief of surviving alone (even when you’re with your family) in the pandemic. The loss of the sense of normalcy. The loss of daily interactions with strangers and of other routines. These, as my therapist has pointed out to me over the past year or so, are normal things we should be grieving. We’re grieving the loss of who we were. In some cases we’re grieving people that we love and care about that we lost. We’re grieving the loss of a sense of safety.

It’s ok to grieve.

You aren’t alone in grieving.

I’ve been doing a lot of grieving myself. Not just from the pandemic, but also my allergies. I have lost most of freedom of movement because I don’t feel safe walking outside. Wood smoke sends me into anaphylaxis. I used to love to walk at night. The calm and quiet would let me work through whatever I was feeling. It was a way that dealt with some of my depression, my grief of nightly parental strife – that loss of emotional safety at home. When my nephew was living here, I used daily walks to help him work through his anxieties and stress from school and family. I can’t do that with him any more.

I am grieving over the loss of food. I have a diet of about 6 things. Well, I’m sure I can eat more than that, but I feel so unsafe eating them that I simply avoid them. I’ve learned that this is something of an eating disorder, I mention it in my Book Review: The End of Food Allergy by Kari Nadeau, I’m scared of trying food I used to love because it might “attack me.”

I’m grieving of all these things. I’m also grieving about the pandemic.

It’s cathartic to read or watch videos that make you feel grief. It might help you process your grief. To give a name to what you’ve been feeling. The reason why you’re angry. If you like video games I recommend playing Gris, because it’s definitely about a woman going through the stages of grief and is a gorgeous game.

A Post Crisis, Economic Recovery and Crisis Mitigation Proposal

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In my last post, I argued that Supply Chains increased the spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic. I proposed the idea of regional centers for manufacturing to minimize sprawling supply chains and to encourage local innovation to meet different needs based on those regions. I think I need to take this to the next step. Localizing ability to respond to crises. Obviously there are huge benefits to scaling manufacturing capability during times of stability and crisis alike. The cost of making a single N95 mask is much lower whenever you know you’re going to crank out another 100,000 masks over the next few weeks. Because the cost of all that capital equipment is spread across all the masks.

However, because of the centralization of these manufacturing centers, in many cases in China or South East Asia, this creates a supply issue if the entire world needs the exact same thing. This requires a strong central buyer to compete on the market to buy additional supplies. In the US that should be the Federal Government. Sadly, this hasn’t happened and in fact, the President is playing favorites with states and providing medical supplies. This is hugely problematic. However, there’s an opportunity here to protect states in the future from an outbreak and to rebuild the economy.

I propose that states, let’s go with Oregon, cause I live there, creates regional innovation and manufacturing centers (OIMC – Oregon Innovation and Manufacturing Center). These OIMC should be positioned at least one per country, but carefully to ensure that if there’s a critical event, such as a Cascade Subduction Event, the region will have an OIMC on each side of the event. In the Portland Metro Area we’d want one in Easter Portland and one in Beaverton or Hillsboro. Furthermore, these should be located in such a way that if a tsunami hits the coast, an OIMC can double as a shelter and emergency production center.

The goal of the OIMC at the surface would be to manufacture critical items during a crisis. For example an OIMC would have the inventory to build ventilators, N95 masks, disease test kits, materials to stop flooding, fight fires, or whatever major crisis emergency items that might impact that specific region. For example, Roseburg might have more items to fight forest fires than the Portland region, because of the types of crises that impact that region. The list of items should be defined by a combination of FEMA and that state’s emergency and health agency.

However, we can’t just have an OIMC doing this sort of work. There aren’t enough crises (thankfully), to warrant establishing a dozen or more of these locations. That’s why these aren’t just Crisis Manufacturing Centers, these are innovation centers. They become a low cost rental space for businesses to start. For example, you want to open a welding shop but can’t afford the cost of equipment, hiring people, managing books, and the cost of a place to rent? No problem, the OIMC will offer business loans and services to manage HR, your books, sales, and provide a no cost then low cost rental location. You have trouble hiring people with the right skills? No problem the OIMC will offer year round training sessions on a variety of tools. It will have to because it will need to have all the skills to make those critical items.

Wait a minute, won’t the OIMC be competing with other companies? Yes. However, whenever we are not in crisis the OIMC can become flex capacity that companies can rent out until they have the capital they need to expand their business. So, during normal time the State of Oregon is not competing with medical suppliers. They are place that offers services instead. This will allow the OIMC to essentially pay for itself.

Furthermore, these centers offer an opportunity for the region to develop and build technologies they need to support themselves. Given the cost of some farming equipment, the OIMC could elect to manufacture some lower cost farming equipment in really hard hit regions. There are some blueprints at Open Source Ecology which can provide an idea of what we could build, if we need these OIMC to provide a lot of capability during a short time.

Holistically, I think this approach can provide flexible manufacturing capability during a major crisis that will allow states and counties to meet their need when the entire country is stressed at once. It will provide regional support during times of emergencies, which seem to occur more and more frequently, and it can provide an opportunity to rebuild communities by offering skills and spaces to start new businesses. Everyone is going to be hit hard by this pandemic. We need a serious plan for addressing this.

Supply Chains Increase the Likelihood of Pandemics

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I think in general the way we respond to this COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic will position us to manage the next pandemic. I know that isn’t something anyone wants to be thinking about as we’re barely into this pandemic. Deaths are rising. We have political leaders making choices around managing the stock market which isn’t the economy. If you want proof of that look at the stock markets response to 3.3 million unemployed in a single week in the US. The Dow Jones Industrial Average increase by 17%.

By having ample supply for treating patients and building strong robust processes we can manage the current pandemic. We can minimize the impact to the overall economy and come back stronger than before. Especially if we make some structural changes that make the direct impact of getting sick survivable. This article isn’t about what those should be.

Instead I’m looking at the forces that increased the likelihood of spreading this disease. Shareholder Value, or more precisely the impact that focusing on shareholder value had on business decisions. Since the Friedman Doctrine was introduced in 1970, we have a steady movement for outsourcing and offshoring. Both of these helped reduce the direct labor costs and environmental regulatory burden on manufacturing companies. It’s helped economies like South Korea, China, Taiwan, portions of Eastern Europe, and most of South East Asia move dramatically from a more agrarian and textile economy – similar to what we see in Africa today – to a modern economy. We can see this through trade, Cesar Hidalgo has dome some amazing research on this and I highly recommend reading his book Why Information Grows, because he outlines some of the reasons why economies mature over time from agrarian to producing semiconductors.

To summarize it, it all starts with trade patterns. You are able to see the knowledge gain in specific sectors in how the trade patterns evolve over time. For example dye making eventually leads into manufacturing pharmaceuticals and other chemical businesses. Eventually this leads to the capability to manufacture semiconductors as all of these use the same sort of fundamental sciences. Hidalgo argues this capability has to mature over time and local expertise must mature. Through the types of items a given country exports we can see how that knowledge is growing and changing over time. Eventually, these countries will create their own businesses to compete with mature companies.

This last part isn’t much of a surprise for anyone that’s read any of the Innovator’s Dilemma books. This is a common practices of dropping “value” functions to lower cost countries and companies from those countries. AsusTEK is an example of this. They started as a supplier to Dell and eventually pushed Dell (for a time) out of a number of markets. In some markets Dell hasn’t been able to reestablish itself and likely never will.

So what does all this have to do with a pandemic? Well as we increase the amount of trade with countries outside of our own region we increase the amount of connections between our country and that country. Those connections must be maintained by people. Since China is a significant trade partner and has manufacturing capability spread out all over the country, it was inevitable that a virus in one part of the country spread quickly through out. In fact the highspeed rail made it incredibly likely. Furthermore, with all the manufacturing in Wuhan, that increase the likelihood of people outside of China coming in contact with the disease.

Since our business leaders have decided to invest so heavily in China, we have something of a weakspot in our supply chain for any future pandemic that starts there. However, for other countries the US or portions of Europe would equally be as likely as source of pandemic source. There’s just a lot of business being done in these countries.

The larger problem will be that because there are zones of high concentration for specific industries in specific countries, that people will be traveling very frequently to those areas. How do we address this, since this is basically what trade is all about.

Well, I think that there’s a solution in the idea of regional production capability. For example, Zara has a lot of regional locations for manufacturing. This can help with supply across both that region and other regions for when there’s a crisis. This minimize the economic impact on Zara as the the crisis moves across the world. Furthermore, this is a good business strategy because regionally disparate countries have different fashion tastes and desires for a given time of the year.

In other cases, the idea of Reverse Innovation can play a key role in this. Reverse innovation is where creating a product that’s profitable in, say, rural India, could be brought back to a place like the United States and sold for an even larger profit. This allows for continually lowering costs, as the product itself would naturally be cheaper, and probably lower total cost of ownership, as the Indians using the equipment may have different skills or tools available and may not be able repair the high tech stuff we can in the US.

An example of where this approach would be highly beneficial to the entire world is with Ventilators. In the US a new one can cost upwards of $25,000, which is obviously out the of the price range of most hospitals in Rural India. If you make on cost effectively in India (which MIT just released plans for a $100 ventilator) you could make it very affordable and would easily allow governments to create stockpiles. It would also allow businesses to quickly tool up and make them, since it looks like they use off the shelf parts.

If business leaders and governments focus on regionalizing supply chains and encouraging reverse innovation, we can work to slow the effects of the next Pandemic. We’d be more positioned to flex supply to meet the increase of demand during the crisis. We’d reduce the amount of travel to potential hotspots, as fewer people would need to travel internationally to meet with suppliers. No more long haul trips to Asia for most people.

In the end, we’d end up creating more share holder value doing this, because we’re meeting customer demand while continually improving products and responsiveness to changes. We will have another pandemic. We will have other market crashes. Planning for them during this one will reduce the impact of the next one.