Coping with COVID: how we can make the best of year three

The next few weeks mark the beginning of the third year since COVID shifted from being a term we needed to google to being a word that’s part of virtually every conversation.

The emergency phase moved to the reactive phase (i.e. developing a vaccine) to the blame phase. And now, as every chief health officer explains, we’re in the coping phase.

COVID is still primarily a health crisis and the medical warnings make it clear it’s a long time until we’ll be seeing it in the rear-view mirror. But what we are seeing is a daily disruption that extends well beyond illness to our mental and financial well-being.

Talk about disruption used to revolve around how technology was upending our lives. But digital disruption compounded by the disruption wrought by COVID takes this to a whole new level.

What’s to be done?

The best response to disruption is to adapt by disrupting ourselves. As year three begins, I wonder if we have disrupted ourselves enough or just sought to put bandaids over the flesh wounds carved by each new twist in the COVID saga. 

How can we try harder? How can we do better than just cope? Here are a few ideas:

Education

We know school will again be disrupted for most of the year as teachers are forced to stay home after either contracting or being exposed to COVID.

Even if they can come to school, they will be teaching a different cohort of pupils each day as up to half of any given class will also be forced to stay home. This might have worked in 2020, but cannot continue (particularly in Melbourne where students have already been to hell and back).

We need to disrupt the learning model. For instance, why not set up teachers to run classes remotely either from home or venues away from school? Students could then be supported through student teachers or even ably qualified parents wanting a career change. 

We cannot accept that students finishing school this year or in 2023 will have had four full years of their schooling interrupted. That is failing them. And variations on the idea above already exist. For example, schools on Queensland’s Gold Coast, which lost up to one-third of its staff during border closures, taught whole classes from their NSW lounge rooms — aided by junior classroom assistants.

Small business

Without the support of the generous 2020 cash handouts, more and more businesses are folding. This is heartbreaking for their owners, but dispiriting also for the rest of us counting off the shops closing around us.

Most small businesses don’t have balance sheets to sustain shutdowns and few are willing to sign up to the lending support offered by the federal government, wary that their homes are on the line if the recovery takes years, not months.

Small businesses have put forward an innovative solution designed by the architect of Australia’s student loans scheme, Professor emeritus Bruce Chapman. It involves lending them support capital only repayable when their profits return to agreed levels.

This is the same thinking that has encouraged hundreds of thousands of Australians to study at university and can be creatively adapted to the small business sector. Why wouldn’t it work?

Mental health

We know the mental health toll the pandemic is taking on the population. Psychologists have closed their books or are offering an appointment in 2023. This will only worsen, so we need to create a workforce to triage mental illness, channelling patients where they are best serviced. Perhaps the answer is to use counsellors with months, not years, of training.

Pharmacies 

Pharmacies are now able to deliver vaccines and testing and should be repositioned permanently to deliver medical services, taking pressure off GPs. Who knows? We might even save hours of time in medical waiting rooms.

Working from home

It’s doubtful whether a large chunk of the workforce will ever return permanently to city offices. How can we use those commercial buildings? It’s simplistic to turn them over to homeless accommodation. Or is it?

We should look for a better idea. Can they be used as education centres or bases for community enterprises struggling to meet the increasing social support needs?

Universities

The same goes for universities which have become truly grand palaces of learning and research but under-occupied for most of the year.

COVID has accelerated online learning and the absence of students (and staff). How can their prime real estate be put to better use and be monetised to fund the research they rightly claim has been so underfunded in this country? Surely there’s a PhD or two in that. Or could we build aged care homes on university grounds, and employ health students to boost staff numbers?

Communities are like people. They respond immediately to a crisis, but the most resilient use it to take stock of their lives and build foundations for the future. We should be like them — and not just run to an election cycle.

How would you positively disrupt things as the pandemic goes on? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.