Coronavirus: Juliette Kayyem on Stages of Crisis Management

Juliette Kayyem, Faculty Chair of the Belfer Center’s Security and Global Health Project, has been providing real-time perspective on the coronavirus on Twitter. Read her recent comments below.

THREAD. Updated crisis management chart to get our bearings for years ahead. New addition: stop talking about recovery. It’s misleading. It won’t come until vaccine distribution. We are entering a totally unprecedented stage, I’ll call it “adaptive recovery.” #coronavirus 1/ pic.twitter.com/MzOacgj1Mj

— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) April 9, 2020

I advise a lot of mayors, govs and biz leaders to help them give context to these strange times. Sharing this now. Virus is new; crisis management is not. We had in past always talked about recovery as getting back to normal. That’s not what we are doing here. 2/

— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) April 9, 2020

We will (where are the kits!) move past social distancing to a phase that is best understood as managing to live with and adapt to the virus. It isn’t normal and it may be years. But we will have choices besides staying at home: better testing/tracking, treatments, etc. 3/

— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) April 9, 2020

It will not be normal until vaccine and 18 months is optimistic for identification and distribution. But it will come. Until then, it will be a recovery of sorts but one where everyday we will need to take adaptive measures to avoid more spread. 4/

— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) April 9, 2020

To say we have only a small sense of what this will feel like is understatement. A CEO has to set a standard for a office closing should an employee test positive; a mayor for a school; etc. As citizens, we will need to adapt on daily basis. It is a different kind of recovery. 5/

— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) April 9, 2020

This is update to previous chart circulated a few weeks back. It held up ok but my thinking has changed. The only true recovery is vaccine. The idea of it being normal anytime soon is fiction from WH.
Hope this helps. Thanks @BloombergCities 6/

— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) April 9, 2020

And finally, more personally, from @WakeDivDean Jonathan Walton, getting our footing for all this is to live in the “now normal” rather than an elusive search for “new normal.” We find our normal now because tomorrow may be different. Now. Virus sets the rest of the schedule 7/7

— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) April 9, 2020