pandemic – Here's What I Think…

Life In The Time of COVID Jamaica style: AN UPDATE

In my last blog post, I took the pulse of members of my immediate family in terms of how they were coping with the pandemic and their thoughts on the predicament that planet was plunged into. This was 6 weeks ago, and we had reported 469 cases of COVID-19, 9 of which had died from the disease. We were under lock-down, working from home, unable to go to the beach, and not certain as to what “normal” would look like. I decided to check in once again as more time has elapsed, and here in Jamaica, as with countries all over the world, we appear to have entered a new phase in our response to COVID-19. People are still getting sick, people are still dying, but the restrictions imposed here in the west as at end March are being loosened. Heck, Jamaica welcomed tourists June 15 for the first time in months! So I wanted to see how my people were feeling, what their thoughts were with respect to this impending “new normal” and just how they’re coping as at now.

Life in the time of COVID Jamaica Style: A snapshot.

Who would have thunk that we’d be here as a planet today? The entire world is grappling with a pandemic which is killing people, decimating economies and baffling scientists. When China first reported this new virus impacting parts of its population earlier this year, I don’t think many of us thought that it would touch us at all. It was a virus, all the way over there. Yet here we are…locked-down, quarantined, working from home, masking up and asking how will this end and when will it end. And guess what? Choose a country, any country anywhere in the world, and someone there is asking those very same questions. It feels as if everything has happened so fast and many of us are just trying to catch our breath and COPE. While I’ve been doing my best to cope, I’ve also been concerned about our children and how they have been coping with this upheaval. So I decided to check in with them and document it as a sort of personal snapshot of COVID-19 in Jamaica. For posterity.

Why aren’t you working from home right now? Life in the time of COVID.

Are you an employee working from home right now? If you are not, why is this so? Are you working on a production line? Are you delivering a tangible to a customer? If not, why aren’t you working from home?

Many years ago I was employed to one of the more forward thinking organizations in Jamaica. I was part of an initiative that saw several of us being trained in forming Business Continuity Plans. This plan was formed in order to keep business running in the face of any kind of business interruption (natural disaster, civil unrest, etc.) We also had to test it, and it was in executing these simulations and tests that I designed that I came up against what I consider to be the biggest obstacle to so many in the work force being able to work remotely: management attitudes. Sigh.