We’ve spent the last week watching growth in Australia relative to other countries, and we’ve seen enough to believe that we, as Australians, need to act decisively in order to slow the rate of infection.
We also believe that unless we as individuals and businesses drastically and quickly change our social behaviour, we put ourselves and our communities at increased social, health, and economic risk.
In Australia we are lucky: we have been late to receive COVID-19 cases, so we are several weeks behind other countries, and we can learn from everyone else’s example.
And what we can see is that early preventative action as individuals—washing hands, staying home, working remotely—plus institutional action such as extensive public testing, daily sterilisation of public transport, shutdown of public facilities including schools, cancellations of large group events—all of these combine to slow the spread of the virus and ease the load on the health system.
Our greatest concern is that in trying to avoid disruption we respond too cautiously, and lose our opportunity to make a big impact. So what are we doing at Liquid?
In addition to monitoring and acting on advice from health authorities:
- We have created a business continuity plan that covers a range of possible scenarios over the next 6 months.
- We’ve briefed our entire company about the seriousness of the threat and continue to educate and inform them.
- We’re tracking the data and doing some inhouse analysis to make sure we understand what is happening and provides us the personal motivation to act.
- We implemented increased office safety practices such as washing hands, maintaining distance, cancelling non-essential travel.
- We are implementing work from home measures and contingencies, and staff are beginning to work remotely already this week.
- We’re sharing our plans with our clients and partners.
- We’re asking our clients and partners to tell us about their plans.
