a window to a “post-pandemic” future

Restaurants, bars and cafes in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, reopened (PIQSELS)

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Australia has been one of the few countries that has known how to control Covid-19 infections, with a non-extreme confinement but with the closure of its borders.

This nation could hold the key to a full return and to a post-pandemic life.

Their strict early confinement, intense contacts and quarantine protocols have helped keep new daily cases very low for months, and with a total number of deaths of less than 1,000 since the global spread of the Coronavirus began.

According to the Australian Department of Health, offices of multinational companies such as Adobe, Facebook and Dell began to reopen in early June last year.

Of course, this progress was not in a straight line from the quarantine, until the meetings without a mask, most of the offices had to prepare before and slowly to operate again. As well as initiating a work of re-education of its workers so that they can share in rooms and common areas, and to the employees who were reluctant to travel again.

Such is the case Shant Soghomonian, Dell’s senior director of sales, returned to his Sydney office last month after a year of remote work, the space looking just as he remembered and he didn’t even have to wear a mask.

But when he walked into a sanitized conference room for his first in-person meeting of 2021, he realized that he had forgotten how to greet colleagues in person.

“Shake your hand? Do you do the elbow bump? Recalls Mr. Soghomonian. Eventually, a consensus emerged around “predominantly elbows,” he says.

Mr. Soghomonian and some 2,000 of his Dell colleagues in Australia have been able to come to their offices in person for months. On March 9, all six Dell offices in Australia entered their third and final phase of reopening. Meanwhile, about 41,000 Dell employees in the US remain completely remote, in “phase 0,” for the near future, according to a Dell spokesperson.

There is no buffet in most companies, and cookies or other sweets are no longer shared at receptions, it has been replaced by gel alcohol and products to keep hands clean.

Three days ago Dell closed its offices for only three days, due to new cases in the area, but once these new cases were followed up, the company decided to go back to work.

However, for this entire strategy to work, they will maintain the hybrid model, that is, the working day will be shared between the home office and going to the office.

For the Oceania continent, the key to maintaining a kind of “normalcy” and avoiding the decline of the economy is simply to follow up on cases and impose measures with clear objectives.

This country opted for the strategy of eliminating and not mitigating the virus, unlike the United States and in almost all countries in the world, which consists of taking very strict and very fast measures to destroy the curve instead of flattening it.

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