Businesses are thankfully, if latently, taking COVID-19 quite seriously. Very few face better times in the weeks and months ahead, and the suffering will come least to the early movers.
Offices are sending employees home to work remotely, hoping they can maintain productivity and results. Some high-profile retailers are closing and paying their staff while they’re off, while others are reducing their hours as their clientele diminishes and in anticipation of illnesses that will pare their workforces.
Anecdotally, supermarkets feature shelves cleared by panicked shoppers, deliveries are not arriving as scheduled and some of the counter help is clearly distressed.
Almost every business is contemplating a lengthy period that calls for day-to-day operational gymnastics – if not now, then soon, because somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of Canadians will get it, and the more serious cases will be devastating.
Timing would never be great in such circumstances, but it’s made worse with so much deactivation taking place as spring break ensues. For travellers this will be a long March break, with part of it abroad and part of it in isolation.
The government’s travel restrictions Monday don’t much affect commerce – our border appears to be business as usual – but that could easily change if the contagion curve isn’t flattened.
Mercifully, much clearer help will be unfurled for businesses and individuals in the next day or two. Many of our smallest businesses will have no choice but to close, perhaps permanently, in the absence of direct government assistance. Given the numbers, given their basic precariousness, how can they not?
More than 8.3 million Canadians work in businesses of fewer than 100 people; in British Columbia, more than 1.2 million do so. Those businesses represent 98% of the total. Drill down, though, and the numbers are super-scary.
In Canada, nearly three-quarters of businesses have fewer than 10 employees, and nearly 55% have one to four employees. In B.C., some 113,200 businesses (or 22% of the total) have four or fewer employees, and about 315,000 are self-employed without help. Try keeping that running when someone is infected.
History shows that these tiny businesses in Canada already have only a two-in-three survival rate for five years and a one-in-three survival rate for 15 years. What further stress on them might we expect in the time ahead?
There are thousands of cases of COVID-19 going undiagnosed, helping the highly contagious virus to spread – thus the pleas from authorities for social distancing. Justin Trudeau’s message seems to amount to: Come home and stay home for travelers, be home for the rest of us.
We are rapidly passing a stage of containment and moving into one of care for the sick, and this is where we might most worry.
The country has a total of less than 4,000 intensive care unit beds and about 6,000 respirators in our hospitals. We will likely come to regret the fact we are in the middle of the pack among developed countries with this degree of severe illness care. We planned our intensive care for a linear path reflective of demography, not the byzantine route we are experiencing and can expect now with recurrent viruses. (Yes, there will be many more coronaviruses.)
At Vancouver General Hospital, for instance, there are 27 beds. St. Paul’s has 19. Royal Columbian in New Westminster has 16, and the entire Fraser Health Authority has 80 for a population of 1.9 million.
Stack the resources against the anticipated requirement. The math is depressing.
It is expected that 10% of those afflicted with COVID-19 will require hospitalization and 5% will require mechanical ventilation.
The estimates are that between 30% and 70% of us will get it. Let’s go with the conservative estimate of 30% and say 10% of those will need hospitalization. That means about 11 million will get COVID-19, more than one million will need to be hospitalized and more than 500,000 will need a respirator – not for a few minutes, but perhaps for days or weeks.
Social distancing should now become our national sport. Our health care workers need us to be major-leaguers. •
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
