Leadership, Humanity and COVID19

Hello everyone.  I trust you and your loved ones are doing the best you can at present. In the face of the SARS-CoV-2 virus-related pandemic and the varied severity of COVID19 ailments, morbidity and mortality, we all have been shaken and humbled. Seemingly remote pandemics like the 1918 influenza catastrophe, and more recent albeit more limited infectious challenges like SARS and MERS, had raised our awareness that microbes rule the planet. Yet, we as a global community were not really ready for what has transpired. The complexity of what unfolded, how it unfolded and what its ultimate impact will be is difficult to comprehend. When this novel human pathogen raced across the world, it was met with uncertainty, false starts, political encumbrance, and is now conveying a large amount of human, social and economic insults.  Facts mean everything.  Commonsense means everything.  Sensibility means everything. Communication approaches mean everything. Leadership for the common good means everything. I wrote the following thoughts down several days back.  Most of them still pertain and will pertain for the foreseeable future. I think COVID19 has laid bare the paucity of substantive leadership in the face of crisis.  We as humans must do better…I would welcome your thoughts.

Few people would disagree that leadership markedly affects the state of humanity. Leadership as such is defined by characteristics including substance, integrity, selflessness, sensibility, humility, passion, clarity, and sensitivity to the needs of others. Leaders must be able to communicate effectively in diverse forums and settings.  They must follow communications with coherent actions, especially aimed at improving society as a whole, protecting the common good, and respecting the planet on which we reside. True leaders believe in equity, equality, fairness, and in having bigger ears than mouths. They listen.

Over millennia, the importance of leadership in villages, towns, cities, regions, countries, and continents has been well documented. Revered leaders are often remembered for their roles in governments and at the time of major international conflict. They are often recalled for their strength in the face of crisis or a pressing societal need. Yet leadership is not limited to the halls of governance, rather it is evident and required across disciplines and sectors that foster progress in thinking, knowledge creation, productivity and innovation. While the generation of new knowledge has accelerated at an algebraically breakneck pace in recent decades, there has always been new information, awareness and guidance arising from the peoples in the communities where we live.  Human beings are privileged to have insight, intuition, intelligence and interest sufficient to impact our local and global societies in steady, albeit cyclical waves of improvement. Such improvement has included the development of a repertoire of skills and activities relevant to public health and its determinants.

The insights of epidemiologists, biologists, modelers, and public health experts, coalescent across borders during crises like pandemics are the essential foundation for saving lives and saving the quality of our societies. Science, music, arts and innovation have long crossed borders and have reached new heights of excellence over centuries, often strongly during crises. This need for sharing of imaginative solutions is amplified and heartening when we are under pressure.

In the current context of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID19 it causes, the leadership of the world has been flummoxed. Despite former pandemics to learn from, the response has been uneven and incoherent.  The World Health Organization has tried valiantly to maintain a clear messaging process around COVID19, but local situations have required leadership pertinent to particular populations and societies.  This national and local leadership has been a pivot point for comparative success or failure to block the assault of SARS-CoV-2 on human beings. It is tragic that in the maelstrom of uncertainty that the virus has inspired, there are too many voices, not enough ears, and not enough attention to factual underpinnings of the crisis. Too much talking by a range of political leaders, by a range of media outlets and publications, by people informed only by ideology, has led to confusion, chaos and catastrophe in many jurisdictions. Unnecessary lives are being lost and even more lives have been adversely affected permanently. The associated social, economic and political upheaval is only beginning to be gauged.

This too shall pass…  But will we as the guardians of peoples, of societies and the earth have learned sufficiently to better address and smash the inevitable next crisis together, hand-in-hand. Grasping the opportunity for more “consilience” insofar as how the human world learns, adapts, and hopefully thrives in the future (the drawing together of science and humanities ala Edward O Wilson) could foster approaches more equitable and robust than we might dare to imagine… If we do not learn our lessons well and adapt, we will suffer the same ways we are now when confronted by future pandemics, be they driven by viruses, bacteria or other infectious foes.