MDF Magazine Issue 62 7 August 2020 (7)

lockdown meant hardship for a great many people who lost
access to healthcare, access to their carers, and in many
cases access to the most basic essential of all, food. If you ran
your own business or worked in a small industry, you were
immediately out of work and without any form of income.
The extreme nature of the initial lockdown did not appear
to be properly thought through by the government,
leaving some of our most vulnerable communities
completely stranded and dependent on the goodwill of
private citizens. Certainly in our neighbourhood if private
individuals had not rallied together and assembled food
parcels and their distribution, thousands of people would
have starved in April and May. The hardship continues
and looks likely to get worse before it gets better, but there
are signs of strong community networks developing that
offer a degree of hope. It remains a perilous state of affairs.
Disturbing times.
When is this going to end? Some of us will be watching the
figures in search of a steady downturn. Others are waiting
for a vaccine, and still others are watching others to see what
others are doing. Right at the beginning of this saga, way
back in January or February, when asked how a pandemic
plays out, a friend of mine said, “it's over when people say it's
over”. That increasingly looks to be true as individual people
and communities make their own assessments about the risk
levels and adjust their lives accordingly. Decision times.
So what is going to be the new normal? Certain aspects
of our lives have already put their proverbial hands up,
fundamentally changed by COVID and likely only to
continue to change in the future. The first has been the move
towards internet-based employment wherever possible. As
somebody who comes from the IT industry of the 1980s,
I have been acquainted with the concept of working from
home for probably 25 years. It has always been something
which the industry has aspired to but never quite achieved.
Whilst many people have succeeded in realising this
concept, most still find themselves travelling to an office each
morning. The virus has changed all that, forcing big
businesses to throw all of their efforts into setting up a
work-from-home infrastructure. Whilst some might
gradually go back to their offices over time, the work-fromhome
model is now well and truly established in South
Africa. Another aspect, specifically for those who have
children, is the introduction of online education. Whether
or not this gains a foothold and becomes more generally
accepted remains to be seen. Certainly there is a genuine
opportunity for the merger of the home-schooling model and
the online education model into an integrated educational
system. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in
the years ahead. Another new normal is the acceptance of
online shopping as a firmly entrenched aspect of our lives.
In South Africa online retail has largely struggled to gain a
foothold because of our non-performing postal system.
Courier companies have developed to fill the void, but they
are expensive and this has acted as a brake on the industry.
COVID has changed all that and introduced online shopping
to all generations of South Africans, whether they wanted to
navigate the waters or not. It is somewhat amusing to talk
to friends who are in their 70s and 80s and hear them tell
about their latest online shopping experiences in great detail.
They are the new millennials! In terms of communication
there has been a consolidation of cellular and internet-based
technology. There is no doubt that the new normal now
involves the everyday use of WhatsApp and Skype and that
new kid on the block in the form of Zoom. For those running
businesses, clubs or social groups and those wishing to get
family groups together, Zoom has been a hugely successful
discovery. Turbulent times.
Strange times indeed.
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