The Lingering New Normal

The authors draw implications for country resilience – including admonition not to learn the wrong lesson from early ostensibly successful handling of a crisis (Zhou, 2020); advantage of ‘knowledgeable decentralization’ (Grandori, 2020); ‘communal sense’ in Japan coupled with ‘dispersed authority, and unique way of absorbing change without losing itself’ (Redding, 2020); and the benefits of rethinking loose coupling and flexible interdependence of systems and platforms (Li, 2020). [...]in this introduction resilience is explored at three stages – prior to a crisis, during the crisis, and beyond, in a context where a crisis may not have ended but rather constitutes a lingering new normal. To treat the potential pandemic as a risk management issue, would mean either accepting the eventuality by strategic decision or by inertial default of ‘not preparing enough’ (Efforts to accelerate vaccine development are presently ongoing.) Having failed (or neglected) to manage the risk of an eventual pandemic, government efforts have focused on controlling and eliminating uncertainty by enforcing a physical isolation of people. [...]many questions related to the spreading of the disease were unknown, beginning with the genome of the virus (later sequenced), its deadliness and rate of spreading (much has been already learned), the human cost of developing an immunity in a society (still an open question).