Covid-19 creates obligations, not opportunities

In crisis situations, such as financial recessions, people often refer to the stereotype “crisis creates opportunities”. This is not the case with Covid-19, unless your enterprise is producing sanitizers or masks, or you can develop the vaccine by September. We are all subjects in the biggest medical-, social-, and financial-experiment of all times. This is not even a zero-sum case. We all lose and primarily those that will experience the worst side of the pandemic, i.e. the coronavirus disease.

Nevertheless, there are areas for which this crisis creates obligations that we all need to follow, in order to survive through this nightmare. Some of these areas are:

• Healthcare: Governments around the world are continuously upgrading their Health System in terms of capacity, personnel and infrastructures. It is their obligation to support it at any cost, in order to be able to support the thousands of infected people. At the same time, the clinical sector is working day and night to find the vaccine, antivirus drugs and interventions of higher efficacy, while vendors are supplying ICU equipment, ventilators, Covid-19 tests, etc. All these should come in reasonable prices, without exploiting the huge demand. This is an obligation, not an opportunity.
• Social responsibility: Listening carefully to the recommendations of the civil protection authorities and following the rules of social distancing and lock-down. This is an obligation, not an opportunity, even though during lock-down we might get some peace-of-mind to do things and appreciate things we had for granted.
• Ethics: We have to behave like clear-thinking humans and not like morons with purchasing hysteria, buying tons of toilet paper, tens of sanitizers and other goods in large volumes, which creates lack of products for many citizens and increases the cost of goods. Again, this is an obligation, not an opportunity.
• Economy: Eventually, we will all need to downgrade our financial status, because if we don’t do so, the recession will be worse. Many sectors will be tremendously affected and will need the support from those that will survive. It is really encouraging to see already many contributions spanning from simple individuals to famous entrepreneurs, and from small startups to big corporations. Again, there will be no opportunities in this regard, only obligations.

More than ever, we are all in this together and we are all on the same boat. If it sinks, we are all drawn. If we fulfill our obligations, we will experience the impact in a smoother way. These days, people say that we have to flatten the curve, talking about the evolution of infected people. Talking about the economy, we need to shorten the flattened curve and this requires sacrifices.

What is our contribution to this? In Innovation Sprint we were working hard, before the Covid-19 outbreak, to have Healthentia SaaS service launched at the end of Q1. When we realized the situation with Covid-19, we stopped this activity and aligned our efforts to deliver a solution that can be used by the public authorities and hospitals at no cost, to capture symptoms and keep people informed. We had to delay other tasks and features in our pipeline, but that was the minimum we could do to contribute to the fight against Covid-19 as a technology company in the medical/clinical field.

Healthentia is currently used in an Italian hospital, while we have ongoing discussions with several entities around the world and we expect to support several of them. This will help us to get some publicity for our product Healthentia, but trust me, we never thought to benefit financially from the situation, even though there is a lot of money spent for technical solutions these days. Speaking of which, I would like to thank the great iSprint-ers that embraced this idea and worked hard to deliver the Covid-19 version of Healthentia in no time! Thank you guys, we will go for drinks (when bars open again).

I cannot predict the impact of our contribution; hopefully will be good enough. That said, I encourage you all to act similarly; I am sure there are ways that you can contribute too. Remember, Covid-19 creates obligations, not opportunities.