The COVID-19 pandemic is now a global fact. It still involves many uncertainties. At present and in the near future, we need to handle the ongoing pandemic as a global catastrophic crisis with complex cascading impacts. We also need to start thinking about reconstruction. We are here concerned with reconstruction that will allow polities to fully function again, i.e. not to be in emergency mode. That may go from norms to socio-political systems, through ways to produce goods and services. It may be elements of these systems, or larger parts of them.

In this article, we explain first that we have tools to plan ahead properly and constructively even considering the condition of utter uncertainty. We must not allow the unpreparedness disaster that is also striking us to go on. Unpreparedness, resulting from lack of anticipation, must also stop.

We then turn to the real issue we need to consider: surviving and reconstructing. We thus outline our research question and our scope. We explain that we are coming back to the fundamentals of politics (and not politician politics). We start outlining how both surviving and reconstructing are intertwined. As a result, we paint a sketch of what is ahead and what we need to further research.

Finally, we start the construction of a structure for our set of scenarios that will outline the possible futures. We underline that two factors are critical and will determine our future: vaccine and antiviral prophylaxis and treatment. Here we focus on the first of this factor, vaccine. We do not only look at the discovery of the right vaccine for the COVID-19 but also at the various stages of the immunization process. As a result, we obtain a first estimate that mass campaigns of vaccination may start earliest around winter 2022-2023 (all vaccine candidates). The next article focuses on antiviral prophylaxis and treatment.

Considering the very large scope of the task ahead, this article is the first of a series of articles focusing on strategic foresight and anticipation to survive at best the COVID-19 and then reconstruct.

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Author: Dr Helene Lavoix (MSc PhD Lond)

Source: The Red (Team) Analysis Society