Insights from yesterday`s Economist interview with Bill Gates about Covid-19

 Hello everybody. Good to see You again here in my blog for sharing with You my post number 63. 

This morning I was once more impressed, how immediately after publishing my post, the first readers popped up at such exciting different places all over the world as Cologne/Germany, Curitiba/Brazil, Sydney/Australia, Austria area, Huddersfield/United Kingdom, Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia and Campo Grande/Brazil. 

Thank You very much for Your ongoing interest in my posts, interesting comments and comradship. 

For my todays post I have decided to share some information about how we deal actually with Covid-19 at our company Vulkan do Brasil (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/holding/vulkan-companies/brazil) and the Covid-19 development in general.

As already mentioned in earlier posts, we have in different steps implemented lots of protection measures at our factory in Itatiba, Sao Paulo, and for all our employees in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico since the spread of Covid-19 started in the middle of march. 

Together with my colleagues Luis Traúzola, VP Admin, Ferdinand Senske, VP Operations, and Marco Santos, HR & Special Projects Director, I personally follow up 3 times per week how the situation in Itatiba, where we our factory is located, and within our company is developping and so far - thank God - everything at Vulkan do Brasil is very well under control and functionning without any problems.

Whenever employees show symptoms which could indicate Covid-19, we sent them home into quarantine and ask them to do Covid-19 PCR tests in accordance with our external health insurance specialists and at pre-selected trustful laboratories. In the case of positive Covid-19 test results these employees continue at home in quarantine for 2 weeks and another 2 weeks after this they are beeing asked to do seriological IgG & IgM tests for sorting out any further contamination risks before we release them for continuation of their normal professional activities. 

So far we have had only a handful of Covid-19 cases amongst our employees and none of these had become critical. But we watch this very carefully and on daily basis. 

The general situation regarding Covid-19 in Brazil continues diffuse. Since the consecutive dismissal of two health ministers by the Brazilian president several months ago, our country continues practically without any health policy coordination on federal level and the federal states - like Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and all others - are doing their own health policies without any major alignment between themselfes and on national territory level. 

Although last weekend some positive developments regarding Covid-19 have been communicated in Sao Paulo state, last night the mayor of Sao Paulo city declared, that in Sao Paulo city the schools will not open again after the end of the school holidays in september because of the high infection rate detected amongs young school children. 

Thus the uncertainties continue and no real light can be seen in the Brazilian Covid-19 tunnel still. All hope is now totally focussed on the hopefully soon available first vaccines. But for sure, this is not realistically foreseable for this year still and might take half of next year - even seen within optimistic scenarios. 

This means clearly for us at Vulkan do Brasil and our employees, that we must continue with our strict protection policy and may not play with any risks.  

As subscriber of the english journal The Economist, which I like very much because of the very diverse, fundamented and global news and information, I had been invited yesterday to participate in an online interview between a reporter of The Economist and Bill Gates about Covid-19 and its development. 

During this interview Bill Gates made some - statements, which I found quite interesting:

- "Asia, where everything started, has done pretty well."

- "What`s most missing in the world are trusted leaders with clear messages."

- "The challenge for the big economies is, how to spend billions in order to save trillions."

- "The vaccine factories all over the world are getting organized for starting with the supply of vaccine from Q1 2021 on."

- "Vaccination of  30 - 60 % of the world population will stop the spread of Covid-19 and this should be accomplished most propably by the end of 2021."

- "It´s the digital world which allows the economies not to become worse during Covid-19."

- "The worst ist still ahead in the developping countries."

I am not a fan nor an enemy of Bill Gates and I must admit, that I can hardly imagine, how the last 3 decades would have been without windows as operating system and all these MS computer programs like excel, word, powerpoint etc. on most of our PCs. 

But I had the deep impression during the interview yesterday, that this man - in the contrary to many politicians - has a quite good picture and clear understanding of the global dimension of the actual Covid-19 crisis and that he is sincerely commited and busy in helping to seek solutions for getting out of this terrible crisis - on a global, not just local - scale.

I hope You found this interesting and I would be very happy to receive feedback from You about the above mentioned subjects and Your own experiences with Covid-19 in Your companies. 

Anyhow we`ll meet again here in my blog tomorrow. Have a great day, lots of success - and take care !