Lessons learned from managing COVID-19 (Week 3)
Practical lessons learned during the third week of managing the COVID-19 epidemic in South Korea.
This is the third update from our coffee and gimbap fuelled COVID-19 Working Group in Seoul.
To recap, I’m a crisis management specialist embedded within a client organisation in Seoul, with the mission to guide them through the COVID-19 situation. This follows similar work in Singapore, which is now becoming the darling of COVID-19 case studies.
I’ve now been on the ground in Seoul for three (loooong) weeks, and have already posted lessons learned from Week 1 and Week 2.
There are people I’m meeting with daily whose faces I have never seen and whose hands I’ve never shaken. Hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to do that before I leave (which will be some time in April, probably).
I thought I’d kick off this week’s update with a few high level perspectives before diving into what we’ve been up to this week.
What’s it like in Seoul?
The situation in Seoul is calm. People are going to work (wearing their masks). People are also shopping, riding the subway, and generally getting on with their lives (also wearing their masks).
Toilet paper is abundant.
We had a new cluster in Seoul in this last week, with 90+ people working in a call centre contracting COVID-19 (they weren’t wearing their masks). While this new incident came as a surprise, it provided an opportunity to remind everyone that we’re not quite done yet, and we need to be vigilant.
In a pandemic, we’re all only one or two degrees of separation away from someone who is carrying the virus. I mean, if Tom Hanks can get it, we can all get it.
I haven’t been to Daegu, which is the hardest hit area in South Korea (it would be completely irresponsible for me to go there), however I’ve heard from our team that people are getting on with their lives there as well. We have a large group of people quarantined in Daegu as a precaution due to close contact with people who have been tested positive for COVID-19 (generally family members), but otherwise our teams continue to work.
We’ve wielded the scalpel that is home quarantine well so far. At the same time we’re all completely clear-eyed that we could be hit with a confirmed case at any time.
I’ll start this article by focusing on the two key questions people have been asking me — “what can I do as an individual”, and “what are the most important things I can implement for my organisation”. I’ll then provide a few updates on what our focus has been for this week.
What can you do as an individual?
I’ve seen some pretty weird shit online this week. I’m not going to comment on any of that, but rather I’ll offer my own version of a Personal Guide to Surviving the COVID-19 Pandemic:
Don’t panic. Don’t downplay the risk. Don’t exaggerate the risk. Listen to the scientists. Wash your hands regularly. Wear a mask when in public. Keep away from groups of people, particularly if they’re not wearing masks. Check in on friends and family.
Above all, accept responsibility that you, as an individual, have an important role to play in maintaining social cohesion and preventing the spread of the virus.
Sure, you may young and healthy and may not die from it, but you could pass it on to someone who will.
Pandemics are the ultimate team contact sport. We all have skin in the game.
What can you do for your organisation?
In my last two posts I dove deep into specific measures organisations can take to plan for, mitigate against, and respond to COVID-19. Rather than repeating those details, here’s a Cliff Notes version:
Implement work from home where you can
Work from home isn’t something you can just jump into — it needs good planning. Implementing work from home practices isn’t just about protecting people while in the workplace. It’s also about keeping your employees out of trains and buses, away from busy cafes, and generally out of harm’s way.
Remember that not all organisations can work from home. My client here in South Korea has dozens of facilities where it’s just not possible to work from home. Many of the people you rely on day-to-day can’t work from home either. But if you can, you should.
Socialise good personal hygiene habits
Use emails, posters, and gentle public shaming to cajole people to wash their hands and practice good personal hygiene. If people are coughing in the office, send them home (I’m serious about this — someone coughing in the office at a time like this will put everyone on edge).
Make sure you can effectively do contact tracing
Have contact tracing procedures in place and practice them before you have to do it for a real case where people’s lives may be at risk. Even sophisticated organisations are struggling with this. Develop tools early on to make contact tracing faster and more accurate. More on this below.
Implement social distancing
Look for opportunities to create space between groups. Stop people moving between facilities, restrict people in the same facility from moving between floors, and prevent shifts from coming into physical contact with each other. All of these measures will limit the impact of quarantine measures if you do eventually get a case.
Unless you’ve implemented good social distancing, your organisation will probably only be able to quarantine a few cases worth of close contacts before you start taking serious hits to productivity.
Your organisation should configure itself in the same way that terrorist cells do — people in one cell should have no contact with people from the other. In situations like this, this is a resilient organisation.
Now onto this week.
Our Case Handling Guidelines are rocking it
Probably the most impactful thing we’ve done to date is to develop our Case Handling Guidelines. As mentioned last week, this is our “Rosetta Stone” for handling cases. It’s streamlined our entire approach to case management, enabling us to delegate many aspects of it down to facility level.
What are we focusing on now?
Over the past few weeks we’ve been bedding in processes and procedures. As mentioned above, most of the hard work of case investigations is now being done at our facilities. At the Working Group level, we’re reviewing each case, and supporting our teams to make good decisions regarding who should be quarantined and who shouldn’t. We’re also continuing to communicate to both managers and employees.
Here’s a few of the major initiatives from this week.
Visual Case Management
A new initiative this week was the development of a Visual Case Management tool. This tool has enabled us to look at a case history along a timeline, with graphical elements displaying seating positions in offices, canteens, and buses. This allows us to decide on quarantine measures, and just as importantly it helps us to explain to others why we’re making those decisions. When you look at it graphically, it’s immediately clear why certain people are being quarantined and why others aren’t. This has saved us a lot of time and helped us keep the number of people quarantined to a minimum (while not compromising safety).
Improving contact tracing speed and accuracy
We’ve also honed our procedures to make contact tracing as fast and accurate as possible. At our higher risk facilities we’ve implemented table numbers in canteens (a highly vulnerable area because people don’t wear masks while eating, and are sitting close together). We’ve also implemented seat numbers in buses (yep, people are still taking buses to work because without them they couldn’t get to work).
Following the development of our Visual Case Management tool, we’ve also started breaking down close contacts into categories (low, medium, and high risk contacts). This is enabling us to make more selective risk-based quarantine decisions.
Building the resilience of key facilities
This week we’ve had the headspace to start looking at important facilities that aren’t yet impacted but are key to the business. We’re making sure these facilities follow the same mitigation protocols that are being applied to facilities in the higher-risk areas. This gives us some additional assurance that these facilities will be more resilient if they do have a confirmed case.
Scenario planning for multiple cases
As part of our scenario planning we’re also exploring the potential impact of multiple confirmed cases at a facility, particularly if there is evidence of person-to-person transfer. This is a more complex problem that would almost certainly result in a facility being closed and everyone quarantined, if we weren’t completely confident we could contain the outbreak via quarantine. This raises the stakes considerably, and is what’s keeping me up at night right now.
“It’s not over yet!”
We’ve also been promulgating communications aimed at ensuring people don’t start getting complacent and lowering their standards of personal hygiene. While case numbers in South Korea are declining, incidents like the call centre mentioned above make us concerned that if we relax too early we could make ourselves vulnerable.
That’s it for another week, folks. I’m here all month, so expect another post around this time next week.
Stay safe, take care of each other, and good luck finding toilet paper.
If your organisation needs support during the COVID-19 pandemic, please feel free to reach out to us for advice and assistance. We can help you to implement mitigation measures, establish best practice for case management, or implement back to work plans that won’t place your employees at risk. You can learn more about what we do here.
