Sarb Johal's Blog, page 3

The New Covid Protection Framework: Initial Thoughts

The Prime Minister outlined the new Covid Protection Framework this morning.

Here are some of the key points from a psychological point of view

Outlining the new structure and how it will work will be helpful for most people. And it clear that the goal is to carry on vaccinating at speed and scale to ensure that people are protected as much as possible before Covid reaches all parts of our communities.

In order to gradually and carefully open up, the Government has set high but realistic vaccination rate targets of 90% double vaccinated in each DHB before the new Framework takes effect. The goal is to minimise the spread and impact of covid while offering broad protection. The approach is formally shifting from elimination to containment, control, and, where appropriate, stamping out clusters of infection.

Vaccine certificates will be critical for accessing services under a new system.

Highly targeted and localised lockdowns will be used if needed. The Government hopes that this new framework helps us to move forward, safely – but acknowledges there will be more cases in the community that we have experienced before. This framework is about reducing impact.

The Government approach here is to incentivise behaviour change in access to goods and services, other than those that are strictly necessary, eg food, and health services. Behaviour change and maintenance now then being approached from several different angles, with multiple nudges and policy settings to shape experience of life if people choose to remain unvaccinated. Life will be more open for those who are vaccinated, more limited for those who choose not to be.

It’s an explicit statement of intent

And a framework to help shift individual behaviour for the collective good, sharing responsibility, but also offering protection for those who are more vulnerable. However, we need to take care to understand how particularly vulnerable communities will be protected with general DHB targets to ensure that they are not left unprotected, while striking the balance in opening life experiences up again for those who are fully vaccinated.

There are still some questions about how the most vulnerable will continue to be protected, but this framework looks like it offers hope for progress towards a more engaged life again soon, with our life goals and each other. 

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Messaging with some Bottle

Simple, clear messaging

This is what has been what has been so successful in New Zealand’’s pandemic so far. 

This is partly because the goal we were aiming for was clear – and that was elimination. And the Alert Level system was the process through which we got to that outcome. It was a complete story – it had a beginning, and a goal, and a process by which we navigated how we achieved that goal. 

What was helpful about it was that it helped us to understand what we needed to be doing, whether we were doing it right, and if it was making a difference.

The new stepped process for Alert level 3 in Auckland has lost that clarity for many people – such as the simple message of no mixing of bubbles indoors.

Whatever comes next in the Government’s messaging will be a new process – revamped Alert Level System, a possible traffic light system, whatever – that also needs to help people to understand what to do, to show them how to do it and give them clear guidance about if they are doing it right, and if it is making a difference. 

This is going to be more complex in the next few weeks because there are so many more moving parts this time around, like possible home isolation, vaccine certificates, regional differences and inter-regional travel restrictions. These were unusual or didn’t exist at all for much of the past 20 months. So, there’s going to be a lot more to keep track of and process in terms of information that we need to understand and act on. 

Messaging will have to be even clearer than it has been on its best day, let alone its worst

Clarity about what any new alert system is designed to achieve would help. Having “a good summer” is one thing, but it’s more like a staging post. What happens next? A newly designed alert level process will probably be easier to communicate and understand if it’s clearly tied to a destination – an outcome.

What happens next?

Where are we heading to? That’s what’s missing right now. A traffic light system, or whatever comes next, may help us navigate our way there, but it doesn’t tell us where we are going.

The tough part is that no-one knows the ending of the story right now. It’s not just challenging New Zealand – this dynamic is being experienced all around the world. But we can gather clues about what might happen next here through what has happened in other places around the world. It might not give us all the answers to where we might be headed next, but we need to have a better idea of the story arc and general direction, or else the danger is that we can and will feel quite lost.

The post Messaging with some Bottle appeared first on Sarb Johal.

Messaging with Some Bottle

Simple, clear messaging

This is what has been what has been so successful in New Zealand’’s pandemic so far. 

This is partly because the goal we were aiming for was clear – and that was elimination. And the Alert Level system was the process through which we got to that outcome. It was a complete story – it had a beginning, and a goal, and a process by which we navigated how we achieved that goal. 

What was helpful about it was that it helped us to understand what we needed to be doing, whether we were doing it right, and if it was making a difference.

The new stepped process for Alert level 3 in Auckland has lost that clarity for many people – such as the simple message of no mixing of bubbles indoors.

Whatever comes next in the Government’s messaging will be a new process – revamped Alert Level System, a possible traffic light system, whatever – that also needs to help people to understand what to do, to show them how to do it and give them clear guidance about if they are doing it right, and if it is making a difference. 

This is going to be more complex in the next few weeks because there are so many more moving parts this time around, like possible home isolation, vaccine certificates, regional differences and inter-regional travel restrictions. These were unusual or didn’t exist at all for much of the past 20 months. So, there’s going to be a lot more to keep track of and process in terms of information that we need to understand and act on. 

Messaging will have to be even clearer than it has been on its best day, let alone its worst

Clarity about what any new alert system is designed to achieve would help. Having “a good summer” is one thing, but it’s more like a staging post. What happens next? A newly designed alert level process will probably be easier to communicate and understand if it’s clearly tied to a destination – an outcome.

What happens next?

Where are we heading to? That’s what’s missing right now. A traffic light system, or whatever comes next, may help us navigate our way there, but it doesn’t tell us where we are going.

The tough part is that no-one knows the ending of the story right now. It’s not just challenging New Zealand – this dynamic is being experienced all around the world. But we can gather clues about what might happen next here through what has happened in other places around the world. It might not give us all the answers to where we might be headed next, but we need to have a better idea of the story arc and general direction, or else the danger is that we can and will feel quite lost.

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Vaxxathon: Renewing social license through collective action & social proof

The upcoming vaxxathon is the tonic that New Zealanders didn’t know they needed. But let’s break down why it makes sense from the perspective of some important psychological and social concepts, too.

Collective / Individual action

Although the ‘Team of 5 Million’ is a well-worn and accepted phrase, it’s fallen into disrepair in recent months. As we exited from the first phase of the pandemic, regional lockdowns and the plight of Kiwis overseas trying to return home, and the experience of those that have got back has fractured this national identity. Add to this the reported stigma of being a recovered COVID-19 patient, or an increasing number of people grappling with long covid symptoms, and we can see that the balance has tipped to a more individualised experience.
The vaccine campaign tries to strike the balance of protecting ourselves to protect our community – but the experience of getting a vaccine is individual, mostly. A televised Vaxxathon with regional and national stories and numbers is a great opportunity for the country to come together with a sense of hope to increase both our individual and collective sense of togetherness and protection in dealing with the threat of the pandemic.
And what better way to come together than breaking down the individualised, atomised experience of our social media feeds to come around the TV and share in the cheesy experience of the Vaxxathon. It’s a shared experience and reinforces the idea that we are not alone.

Information and Social Proof

We know that when the situation is uncertain; we seek information from those we trust, and who we recognise as similar to us, or who may have had similar qualms and questions, but who took the vaccine in the end.
But it’s more than just information that acts as a prompt to come forward to vaccination. When we are feeling unsure, we look at people we trust and respect to figure out the ‘correct’ way to behave. This is a phenomenon known as social proof,  which is fueled by the assumptions others in your network know more about a situation than you do. It is also part of our evolutionary programming: in uncharted territory it’s best to stick with the herd and move with the herd, lest we become an outlier, too slow to respond, and get picked off by the predator.
This Vaxxathon is a fantastic opportunity for trusted recognised leaders and celebrities not only to answer questions about the vaccine that people would like answers to, but also to encourage them to show up in particular places for face-to-face conversations where possible too. Through regional and national TV coverage that is geared just as much towards entertainment as it is towards education, people can see others just like them, lining up for the vaccine, seeing the process of what happens, and hearing conversations and stories about their experience too. This may help people develop enough confidence to come forwards to vaccination themselves, quickly and at a significant scale.

Renewing the Government’s social license

A social license is a complex thing with many definitions, but for here, let me just call it the ability of the Government to carry out its business because of the confidence society has that it will behave legitimately, with accountability and responsibly. In my previous post and thread, you’ll see that this is tricky right now, with the challenge of further incursion of the Delta variant meaning a pivot away from a pure elimination approach to … something else that hasn’t been so clearly articulated. While we hope they will further develop this articulation, what they have made clear is the process by which we prepare ourselves to move to another stage. This then becomes the arena in which there needs to be confidence and trust while we wait for the next staging post in our pandemic journey to be outlined with more clarity.
The vaxxathon is about offering high visibility for the vaccine process, to improve and increase trust that this is the right action for everyone to take, and to offer hope and visible progress towards increasing protection for all of us, together. This is also about securing a social license that moving into the next stage of the pandemic is a shared responsibility, rather than solely being about the Government offering large acts of protection.
Government can do what Government can do to prepare the wider health and economic system for what is about to come next. But the Vaxxathon is about offering hope, information, trusted faces and voices, social proof, a whole heap of stories, and a collective experience once again.

Get into it

I’m double-vaccinated already, but I’m going to have a blast.

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​​We have complex feelings about the pandemic response right now. Here’s why.

Impending doom and an overwhelming sense of grief for all that we may have lost, even as the pandemic has played out over the last 20 months in New Zealand. This is the gist of just some conversations and expressions I’ve heard over the past few days. 

Why are we feeling like this? Why now?

When the pandemic hit in early 2020 in other places in the world, they didn’t have time to relish or savour what they had compared to other places. Everyone started in the same place. Some countries were slow to react and underestimated the threat. Others put public health measures of various stringencies in place quickly, and pulsed these up and down according to the danger of the virus in their country: lockdowns, mask mandates, travel restrictions, etc. Other places in the world took a severe hit in terms of cases, hospitalisations and deaths. They didn’t have time to miss what they no longer had in terms of a pre-pandemic lifestyle.

New Zealand took a different path to most. Whereas most countries took a suppression route, we went for elimination. And it has worked well for us, enabling us to enjoy being at Alert level 1 and 2, with relatively few public health measures and restrictions compared to the rest of the world. In New Zealand, we revelled in our freedoms, and they lauded our response around the world.

This is where our cleavage, our split with the experience of the rest of the world, began.

We have been living to our own rhythm ever since

As most of the rest of the world diverged on to a different path, we began perhaps to take our freedoms for granted. Now, we see the rest of the world tackle Covid-19 and the Delta variant according to the challenges it presents given their own context and history of many cases, hospitalisations and deaths in their countries. We are perhaps just beginning down that path.

Though we have a tool in our armoury that was not available for other countries 20 months ago – vaccines – we are experiencing a sense of loss after a period of adherence to public health restrictions and now the eventual deeper incursion of the virus into our communities.

We had our freedoms. We will have them again. But for now, we are again off-time with the experience of the rest of the world as we need to make the psychological adjustment of the possibility of a higher number of cases, hospitalisations and likely deaths which we have not seen in our country yet.

Our experience differs from most of the rest of the world, and it can be deeply confusing

This gap in psychological adjustment at a national scale, and that we lost our hard-won freedoms, is making us feel our loss more acutely, and our anxiety and anger more sharply.

Thinking about the experience of survivor’s guilt can help us make sense of the sometimes contradictory feelings we have right now. Survivor’s guilt is feelings of guilt that occur after surviving a life-threatening, traumatic event when others did not. You are both grateful to be alive, but also grieve for what you have lost. It’s hard to reconcile these two contradictory feelings that we have at the same time. It is not in our usual range of experiences, and we can find it disturbing. We are going through similar contradictory experiences now that we are struggling to understand.

Sometimes, we may dismiss our complex feelings and become tied to an increasingly simplified view of the world.

We prefer black and white to grey

It can make life feel easier – but we can also know that something is missing, something in our experience is being left out.

The grey area now in New Zealand’s pandemic response to the renewed threats of the delta variant means we criticise the Government for not doing enough at both ends of the continuum: going too fast in loosening restrictions but also not opening up fast enough. Some of this criticism is no doubt valid, but we also detect something else going on that doesn’t fit this polarised, simplified view of the world.

Those who occupy the polar positions proclaim that this is how most people should feel and attempt to recruit us to their tribe to exert pressure to shape the world with solutions that help them feel better and achieve their own goals. And although we may agree with some of what they say or recommend, it’s rarely everything. It’s more nuanced, more complex than simple solutions.

Our experience means that we can have two contradictory thoughts or feelings in mind, yet have them both make sense and be an accurate representation of our complex feelings.

It’s not easy, but there it is.

We can both worry about the impact of the virus and want continued lockdowns until the vaccine covers a higher proportion of the population, while simultaneously craving the freedom to see long-missed children and parents on the other side of the world. Both wants and needs are valid, especially this long into the pandemic. And this explains why we feel both this grief of what we have lost, and a fear of what is yet to come, while also wanting to get on with our lives.

We will have to move forwards gently.

The situation has changed and may change again. There is no new normal. There is only change. And we can only prepare ourselves for more change, protect ourselves and each other as best we can, and strike a balance so that we can satisfy our needs for safety and for exploration and fulfillment. We can understand that we can have two seemingly conflicting needs, and yet they both make complete sense to us.

Pity the Government tasked with serving these contradictory needs that both make sense.  

 

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One degree of separation: New Zealand’s Superpower and Covid-19 Vulnerability

We’ve all experienced the superpower. You meet someone and it turns out you both know someone in common. It can happen anywhere, in New Zealand, and even around the world when we travel. And it usually happens pretty early in the conversation too.

It’s the social glue that is our superpower

It brings us joy, and it also keeps us honest, too. But there is a dark side: it can feel like a burden, like everyone is watching us all the time. We can’t mess up without everyone knowing about it. It can be like living on social media all the time.

There is a darker side

The network effect which can bring us so many advantages outside of a pandemic can be our weakness with Covid-19. When we are only one degree of separation apart, and we live like this connectivity has no downside, this is when things can start to fall apart.

It’s been said a billion times, but basic public health measures are going to be needed, and possibly strengthened again soon, and for quite some time. We are tired and exhausted, but there is danger and we need to take care.

Getting vaccinated, practicing proper physical distancing, as well as masking when we need to. All of these measures are necessary but likely to be insufficient measures to stop the spread of the virus completely. That one degree of separation we all live with means that your contact with the virus is likely to get closer and soon.

We need to be prepared to ensure we tip the odds in our favour when that contact comes. That includes preparing those tasked to help us, including networks like civil defence and emergency management. Although health and social care sectors will bear much of the load, there will be an increasing number of people with mild symptoms who we need to assist in managing their needs at home. Having many people coming forward to ED and other health centres is likely to clog up the system fast. Finding ways to help with advice and practical help like food drops and other supplies, is likely to be a key part of the puzzle. And we may need this at a scale we haven’t yet got our head around.

The trajectory is changing

Be prepared. Take care out there of yourselves and each other. But not too close, eh?

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Get the vaccine to get on with life

The uncertainty equation is changing. Before, we had the strategy of elimination and the comfort of the original, simple, Alert Level system. You’ve heard it before, and I’ll say it again: Delta is changing all this.

We know that secondary stressors – the effects of all that we do to keep the primary threat (Covid-19) at bay – can add up so that they become a significant parallel problem. It’s not either / or the virus and the measures taken to eliminate the virus: it’s now both. As I said in my previous post, we need to ensure that we carefully consider the next steps so that we don’t give up all the gains we have made, and jettison our most effective tactics while transitioning to a new strategy.

What can we do?

Recognise that this inflection point is hard. People are apprehensive and grieving for the security that the old Alert Level system brought us for so long. Make no mistake, it is hard to let go. I feel it too. It’s hard to watch people go about their lives as if they know best and that public health advice – and indeed Orders – are for other people. It’s infuriating.

Recognise that whatever we are transitioning to will, at heart, be a process designed to protect us and each other and empower us to get on with our lives. Recognise that hard decisions like mandatory vaccination for workers that come into contact with the most vulnerable of our communities may have to be put on the table for discussion.

Understand that the rest of 2021 and into 2022 will be difficult. But also understand that there are many, many good people helping and working on solving these problems in the background. Thousands of them, as well as everyone doing their best to join in the collective effort to help us move safely through this pandemic to what happens next.

We kiwis, whatever our culture, community or faith, must unite in the genuine qualities that connect us:

to look out for each other and to get on with life

Recognise that as many people getting the vaccine as possible is the surest way for people to get on with their lives. Getting the vaccine (2x) protects both lives – yours and those around you – and livelihoods too.

Because that’s surely the outcome we are aiming for now – protecting ourselves and each other, freeing us to get on with our lives.

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When the trajectory changes again. And again.

In preparing for the next stage of the pandemic, there is a risk that we project what we wish to see for our futures, what we hope and desire, into a physical world that doesn’t care.

It’s not that it doesn’t want to care: it can’t.

The coronavirus pandemic doesn’t have feelings or desires, hates or likes, it just is

To understand why we must not fall into the trap of just thinking we can get on with life, I’m going to first deconstruct what we mean by a virus. Then, I’ll talk about what can happen when our best plans look like they will not work out, and the knee-jerk reactions we must avoid.

Over the last 100 years, our ideas about viruses have changed. First, they were poisons – the word “virus” has its roots in the Latin term for “poison.” Then, we thought of them as living things, and then as biological chemicals. Today, we think of viruses as being in a gray area between living and nonliving: they can’t replicate on their own but can do so in living cells and can also affect the behavior of their hosts profoundly. 

Although not alive themselves, we can usefully think of viruses as a kind of parasite, essentially leeching all biomolecular aspects of life. But from what we have seen, viruses seem to exist for one purpose and one purpose alone: to make copies of themselves – many, many, many copies – and to spread far and wide.

There doesn’t appear to be any purpose, or any kind of conscious malevolent intent in this. Multiplying and spreading is just what viruses do.

Most known viruses are persistent and relatively harmless, not lethal killers. They take up lodging in cells, where they may remain dormant for long periods or take advantage of the cells’ replication apparatus to reproduce at a slow and steady rate, rather than fast. These viruses have developed many ingenious ways to avoid discovery by the host immune system — essentially the genes found in different viruses can alter or control every step in the immune process to mask their detection and to enable them to make more copies of themselves.

When we come across viruses that have, by chance, adapted to take advantage of the opportunities to multiply that a human body can provide them – we can run into trouble. It’s not in a virus’s interest to kill its host too quickly before it has multiplied and spread, but sometimes it can work out that way. Different variants may emerge, and some of these will be more successful at multiplying, and some will be better at spreading. And variants may emerge which can do both while keeping their host bodies alive.

None of this is conscious

None of this is a ‘decision’ by the virus.

It is completely opportunistic.

It is a rapid adaptation to fulfill a single goal: make more copies and spread them wide to make even more copies.

Now, let’s come back to how we humans are meeting this challenge of blocking opportunities for this COVID-19 coronavirus to multiply and spread. Its activities in the human body cause it to multiply and spread, but is also a long-term threat to health, and possibly death.

Through a rapid and remarkable process of developing vaccines that limit the ability of the virus to produce significant harm to its human hosts, we have changed the potential path of impact on our lives.

But the threat isn’t completely removed, though it is significantly altered.

Some people are perceiving the fact that we have not obliterated the threat of the coronavirus as failure.

This is a trap

Actually, there are many traps here to watch out for. I’ll talk about two of them here.

The first is that we are in danger of projecting our wishes for a successful outcome onto a situation which just doesn’t care. Because of our very human and understandable needs to connect with what we recognise to be a normal life again, we assume that our best efforts will change the odds in our favour. And, in all likelihood, they probably will. But most likely not in the time frame or the manner in which we hope it will.

This pandemic is not a 90-minute Hollywood movie. It is not an Instagram Reel. It is not a 750-word opinion reckon in a newspaper. This pandemic and our efforts to control the spread and damage that the virus is wreaking on human lives and livelihoods are messy.

We can fall into the trap that all our efforts will result in smooth, meaningful, positive progress in a time-frame that we have set. The problem is that we don’t get to set the timelines, and we are purposefully making ourselves blind to less positive outcomes. We don’t want to see the mess, or the ragged edges. We want a clean break.

There is a place for hope – a really important place for hope. And eventually things will work out, I’m sure of it. Even I need to hold on to that. But a defensive pessimistic stance tells us that the road will be bumpy and we need to plan for the worst and hope for the best, and all that comes in between. It will be messy – there’s no avoiding it.

This leads to the second trap of all-or-nothing or black-and-white thinking. Whatever the problem may be, because a tactic isn’t working as we hoped it would, doesn’t mean that we throw up our hands and declare that nothing is working and that we must jettison everything and move to a completely different way of approaching a problem. That may or may not be true. But what it actually requires is a nuanced approach to examine what tactics in the toolbox work – or do not work – through judicious and wise selection and safe experimentation with different approaches.

Perhaps it requires a different strategy as the virus and human needs evolve through this time during the pandemic. Perhaps not.

But as the virus changes, so must our behaviour

As much as we wish and hope that our strategy and tactics make a difference to how the virus multiplies and spreads, we must not behave as if this has already come true. This is nothing less than magical thinking. Defensive pessimism remains grounded in reality – what is actually happening and the complexity involved in that, not the nice clean break with the past which we dearly hoped it would be by now.

It is what it is. And we have to deal with life on that basis. Hang in there. 

 

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Do the mahi, get the treats

With Auckland at Level 3 and Covid-19 cases still in the community, our behaviour is more important than ever in staying on top of the spread of the virus. What we choose to do *does* make a difference.

What YOU do makes a difference

If you hate lockdowns and you want to have a glorious summer with lots of choices and options about where you go and who you spend time with, stick to the public health advice. Who knows what might happen once we open further to the world into 2022? If things go one way, we may have trouble booking anywhere to stay as fully vaccinated tourists book up our holiday spots. If they go another way, we may have restrictions as we struggle to contain outbreaks popping up around the country. It’s possible we may even experience both those scenarios.

The behaviour we engage in now can have a major influence on our future path. Don’t break your bubble at Level 3, wear masks, wash hands, stay physically distant, and get a vaccine, and then get the second dose too. As many people as possible.

Don’t let this opportunity slip away.

Do the work, get the treats

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When the flightpath changes

Imagine you’re on a glide path to landing on the runway after a long and bumpy flight.

You’re uncomfortable, and aching to stretch your legs, arrive at your destination and indulge in some home comforts and company. But suddenly, there’s a gust of wind, and a storm blows up out of nowhere. The tannoy bings and the flight attendant pick up the phone link to the flight deck as you hear the engines rev into life. The plane stops descending and you feel it lift again.

Your heart sinks

You hope it’s just going to be once around the block and then another attempt at landing, but somewhere deep inside you know it might mean a diversion to a different airport, and a long and uncomfortable bus ride to where you want to be. Or even worse, back to your starting point, resetting and starting again tomorrow.

Maybe it wasn’t the wind that forced the pilot to pull up. Maybe, somehow, someone got on the runway and it wasn’t safe to land. How they got there isn’t the immediate problem, though that needs a thorough investigation. The point is, they are there, and the pilot needs to decide. From your point of view, looking out of the window, you can’t see. You don’t have complete information. The pilot doesn’t have complete information either. They rely on the information gathered by their knowledge and experience of flight conditions and what’s relayed to them by air traffic control gathering other information that the pilot cannot see from their position. This triangulation means the plane pulls up. The risk is too high to attempt a safe landing.

All the passengers on the plane let out a collective, audible groan. You look around and you can see various reactions: disappointment, frustrations, anger, resignation and more.

“How can this happen?”

“I don’t see why we aren’t landing – the wind isn’t that bad”!”

“Why doesn’t the pilot tell us what is going on?!”

We crave predictability

After a long flight, or a long lockdown, and where expectations have been set for a smooth landing and being able to move on with our lives, it can be very difficult to change the plan. That much is real – it’s hard to give up cherished plans and expectations. But the reality alongside this is that safety trumps everything. Yes, we can get better forecasting systems to predict when and where storms are likely to hit. We can get better processes to ensure that hazards that really could be managed better do not pop up unexpectedly.

But, as passengers, we don’t have access to the flight deck, or the dashboard of information that needs to be interpreted in real time to make as safe a landing as possible in real time.

No one wants this situation, but everyone wants to get down safely. We may have to take a much more uncomfortable route to get to the destination we all want to get to.

But we will get there.

 

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