Up Close and Personal
Up Close and Personal
The only thing flooding many of our minds these days is COVID-19, the novel coronavirus. Before L.A.’s Safer at Home order, the Impact@Anderson team sat down with two UCLA Anderson students to talk about their perspectives on the current global health crisis. Here’s who joined us for the chat:
- Lauren Diaz (’21), who works as a finance and operations manager for the Skoll Global Threats Fund spinoff, Ending Pandemics
- Clarissa Zhang (’20), who has family in Chongqing, which neighbors the Hubei province in China
- Kelly Chung, program manager for Impact@Anderson, who has family in Northern Italy
Note: As this conversation took place three weeks ago and the situation is constantly evolving, some references in this article may be slightly out of date. Each person’s opinions are her own.
Clarissa Zhang (’20) with her mother
Q: Clarissa, where is your family in China? What has the lockdown experience been like for them?
Clarissa Zhang: My family is in Chongqing, close to Wuhan and the Hubei province. Chongqing is not a province but a municipality that functions like a province, such as a city like Beijing or Shanghai. The majority of communities in Chinese cities are gated. This means that they are likely to have security guards managing the entry and exit of residents and visitors. During the social distancing period, most communities turned into the “lockdown” mode, so people are very carefully monitored and controlled both coming in and going out.
Impact@Anderson program manager Kelly Chung (far left) with Innov8social founder and CEO Neetah Parekh, UCLA Anderson lecturer Gayle Nortrhop (’96) and Impact@Anderson executive director Bhavna Sivanand (’14)
Q: Kelly, what about the perspective of your family in Italy?
Kelly Chung: I have family who live in a town close to Verona, Italy, and while their province hasn’t been hit with COVID-19 as hard as other communities in Northern Italy, they are definitely feeling the impacts of the virus. Since the travel restrictions were placed, my family has left their house only to go to the supermarket and dentist. When they leave their house, they carry “auto-certification” forms to justify their travel to police officers who patrol the roads and enforce the nationwide lockdown. Although it is hard for them to stay put in their house for so long, they know the measures are necessary to halt the spread of the virus.
Q: Is what we are seeing in terms of the response in California and the U.S. now similar to what your family has already experienced in China?
CZ: All my family members stayed home for weeks, or even months, voluntarily. Work and school were first delayed to start and then later changed to online and remote format after the Chinese New Year. As far as I know, most communities passed out permits per household so people could go out and do essential shopping as infrequently as possible.
Everyone, regardless of having the symptoms or not, were wearing masks to protect themselves and others. I also personally know someone who lived in a Wuhan community where confirmed cases have been identified. His community was under much tighter lockdown. There would be people delivering groceries to those communities so people could buy their food without leaving.
However, most people understood the reasons behind all the measures and they do believe those were the right things to do to prevent the disease from widely spreading. Considering the population density in a country with 1.4 billion people, I personally think those actions were not only beneficial but also necessary.
Meanwhile, there were also aftermath impacts that just started to surface. My dad’s company has already announced a drastic pay cut for its executive team. I also know people whose work has started layoffs due to the financial consequences of the shutdown in earlier months.
Q: Are you connected to the Chinese students at Anderson? What has the mood generally been?
CZ: Yes of course. However, I don’t want to speak for everyone here since I think everybody’s reaction and mood are different depending on the situation. I can only speak about myself. I was quite worried in January and February, mainly for my family and friends there. I was also pretty anxious and depressed around the time that there seemed to be a lot of bad news flowing around. Honestly, I was also quite angry about how the news and social media here seemed to be more interested in serving a political purpose than assisting in fighting a human crisis.
At the same time, I do think most of the Chinese students that I know have taken the virus and the potential damages in U.S. much more seriously than other students from the very beginning. I knew people took actions such as increasing sanitization, canceling unnecessary trips, and avoiding crowded areas and events as early as January. That said, the dramatic change of the societal attitude in past two weeks still surprised me a little.
Lauren Diaz (’21, second from left) with classmates at MBA orientation
Q: Lauren, sounds like you are at the front lines in your job right now. What do you do at Ending Pandemics?
Lauren Diaz: I serve as the finance and operations manager at Ending Pandemics. In this role, I oversee administrative controls, reporting procedures and people systems to effectively and efficiently grow the organization and ensure financial strength.
Q: How does an organization like Ending Pandemics respond during an outbreak like this?
LD: I’ll start with a little background on what we do. Ending Pandemics’ mission is to detect disease outbreaks faster. To do this, we apply technology, build local capacity and work across borders, both geographical and sectoral.
Nearly all infectious diseases with pandemic potential in humans are contracted from animals. Ending Pandemics works with countries to capture early signals of diseases in animals and humans to prevent spread, protect livelihoods and save lives.Our efforts to monitor and prevent a pandemic threat require a multisectoral approach working with physicians, veterinarians, government officials, environmental scientists, academia and the private sector.
While we are not a typical health or disaster response organization, the systems we currently have in place around the world are being adapted to track COVID-19 spread. Domestically, we encourage folks to visit www.covidnearyou.org, a system we co-founded, where you can contribute your health data so that we can detect COVID-19 symptoms in the U.S. Covidnearyou.org is based on our longstanding platform, flunearyou.org, which is used by the CDC and other groups to track the flu in the U.S. Our leadership team is also serving on various national committees to help inform the federal government on critical science and policy issues related to emerging infectious disease, including the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.
Q: And you were with the Skoll Global Threats Fund before, right? Tell us about that.
LD: Ending Pandemics was formerly a team within the Skoll Global Threats Fund. SGTF was founded by philanthropist Jeff Skoll, who looked around the world and felt that there were threats — pandemics, nuclear proliferation, water insecurity, climate change — that had the potential to cause significant economic or social problems throughout the world. We believe these global threats shared some of the same challenges and, thus, potential solutions for mitigation.
Q: How have your peers at Anderson been feeling about all of this? Have they been coming to you with a lot of questions?
LD: Yes, I’ve been fielding lots of questions from concerned friends and family members. I think the most important item to share is that actions like social distancing, washing your hands can really work. You can visit the Ending Pandemics’ YouTube channel for some fun and useful #ControltheContagion PSAs created by cast members from the movie Contagion. (Our leadership team was on the scientific advisory group for Contagion, and provided the technical expertise for these PSA scripts.)
— Clarissa Zhang (’20)
Q: Do you feel like you’re looking at pandemics with an MBA mindset now?
LD: One major difference in my point of view since starting my MBA is thinking about the best ways that companies can support their communities during an outbreak. For some groups, we’ve seen that they might be well positioned to pivot their regular manufacturing to create items like PPE for front-line health workers. But for many businesses, the biggest impact they can have on the pandemic is to take care of their employees by providing sick pay and other paid leave — that would be a huge benefit and helpful way to help control the spread of not just COVID-19, but also seasonal outbreaks of the flu and other illnesses.
Q: Clarissa, you mentioned your family in China is now worried about you in the U.S. Tell us more about that.
CZ: I think as family they are probably always worried about me, but starting from the end of February, their concern turned much stronger. I think this was partially due to the fact that there seemed to be no strong precaution measures here at the time, and people were still doing their routines, which seemed very dangerous for other countries that have been dealing with the outbreak for months. They started to give me all sorts of advice that I gave them in January.
Starting from last week, when things got much more heated here, more friends and relatives were messaging me about situation in the U.S. As things are getting better in China, multiple people have asked me to consider moving back to China for the time being. I also have several friends who offered to send me masks since there had been a shortage in L.A. since January. In addition to the virus itself, I believe a lot of them are also worried about the increasing xenophobia and hate crime as a result of the current crisis.
Q: It looks like what’s been happening in other countries in terms of lockdowns and mitigation measures is now finally starting to show up in our strategy to cope here. Kelly and Clarissa, what are you are hearing from your families now about the situation in Italy and China? Is there an end in sight on the lockdowns?
CZ: As far as I know, the lockdowns are gradually ending across China. There was zero increase in domestic coronavirus infection on March 19, which was a good sign (still multiple cases identified in people who arrived in China from other countries). Regular work has resumed in most provinces. Schools are not open for students yet but other public services were starting to return back to “normal,” little by little. Large crowd events are still not permitted yet and people are still highly recommended to stay socially distant from each other as much as possible. But the situation is definitely getting better now.
KC: Confirmed COVID-19 cases and fatalities in Italy have slowed in recent days, and the curve is starting to descend thanks to the strict lockdown measures. My family is beginning to see an end in sight with the easing of restrictions on certain types of businesses, such as bookstores and children’s clothes shops. However, at this point, the future is still very uncertain and they’re not sure what the new normal will look like once more restrictions are lifted.
Q: Lauren, are there any resources we should know about beyond the CDC and WHO websites, to read more about COVID-19? Any resources that are being shared around your workplace?
LD: Yes:
Our favorite tracking map is from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
This is a lengthy article, but we found it helpful: Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance. What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, If Leaders Buy Us Time.
We also recommend everyone follow their own county health department’s website for updates that should be most relevant to their community. In Los Angeles County, the information is posted at publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/Coronavirus.For folks interested in how philanthropy is responding, here are a few resources:
