Crisis-ready Leadership

Introduction

The year 2020 will be remembered for decades and studied through multiple lenses. The beginning of the year was marked with a new hazard: SARS-CoV-2, that may be classified as a sub-hazard of infectious disease. This novel betacoronavirus caused one of the worst global pandemics in human history, spawning cascading psychological, social, economic, health, and political effects throughout the world. At the end of 2020, COVID-19 (the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2) had infected 83.8 M, was hospitalizing over 6,000 people per week [1], and had killed 1,824,590 people worldwide [2].

The countermeasures were also devastating causing schools to shut down and move to an online format, cancelation of funeral and church gatherings, and the global GDP decreased by 6.7% [3]. In June 2020, the United States Congressional Budget Office estimated that COVID-19 will cost the US economy $8 trillion over the next decade. Four million US workers were considered “long-term unemployed,” or unemployed for more than 27 weeks. As the government took action to bolster businesses and those who were temporarily unemployed, payments to both businesses and workers were abused. In some cases, unqualified businesses accepted government loans which were forgiven under specific conditions while unemployment payments increased so significantly, that many workers chose not to return to work, creating a labor supply shortage in many industries which in turn impacted supply chains in other industries; ...