Writing the language of quarantine
By: Emil
Tags: Lobbying, Quarantine, Spciety, Co Vid, Communications

From ’28 Days Later’ (2002)

By:

Emil Pevtsov — A political communications professional with six years working in London. He moved to Hong Kong to continue his career in the industry there just before the borders shut.

Oleg Yanovsky — A consultant in strategic and political communications and lecturer at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in Political Science.

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The communication industry is facing unprecedented conceptual challenges because of Covid-19. Whether PR, public diplomacy, or internal communications, it feels as if we’re climbing an ascending slope. Fighting disinformation, while maintaining calm, and placating dissent against self-isolation simultaneously is a complicated task indeed. Unsurprisingly, we are so busy micromanaging that structural changes float past silent and unnoticed. So, we should take a moment to meditate and take a step back, to take a look at the macro-level.

The virus poses a narrative problem, for it remains neglected without a roadmap leading out, only speculation of ‘normal will come back in August’ and the like. Governments and private sector are struggling to catch up to the flood of stories, meaning they cannot explain them succinctly. Furthermore, we are in collective denial, waiting for the ‘normal’ that we will supposedly click back into. The vacuum left by insufficient communications is filled by conspiracy theories, scaremongering and political blame games. The three factors discussed below seek to explain the problems and provide solutions.

First, we are all ‘surviving’ the quarantine, anxiously watching the clock for life to ‘go back to normal’. State communications in the US and across Europe are reinforcing the perception that social distancing is temporary. This is probably supposed to reduce panic, keep public order, and maintain the feeling of business as usual for the government. But achieving this comes at a price.

People’s planning horizon has essentially been reduced to 24 hours as their plans are on pause until quarantine relaxes. In turn, uncertainty causes distrust, disillusionment, and poor economic choices. Rising domestic violence [1], reports of potential increase in mental health issues [2], and Luddite conspiracy theories [3] are signs that confusion is taking its toll. Manufactured anticipation prevents one from beginning to formulate new social conventions for our new reality. On a family level, abnormal divorce rates are a symptom. [4] Thus, the social side effects of Covid-19 may yet prove as serious as the disease.

Businesses are closing down with few innovative ideas arising concerned with how to make a living within the current confines. Energy is not focused on making life in quarantine simpler with new ideas but how to survive until we can go back to ‘normal’. Unfortunately, it is the opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more one waits in a turtled stance, the more industries get wiped out and unemployment rises. These factors compound the previously mentioned uncertainty.

While the quarantine will eventually end, when life does ‘return to normal’ the attributes of the past may not be perceived the same way as the world would have spent long enough in quarantine to understand that ‘normality’ is in fact a luxury. Economic recovery will not occur in one day either. Maintaining social trust and calm through these trying times will be an arduous task.

Secondly, let’s take work. The majority of the economy operates on working routines. We go to work, sit in front of a laptop, have coffee or the Pret sandwich with colleagues, and go home. Rinse-repeat. This drumbeat means that life remains mostly compartmentalised. With quarantine came the advent of working at home. Sleep schedules, office hours, the line between workday and weekends all flew out of the window, replaced with a state of living at work, when all time melds into one colourless stream. The change in working patterns has had even deeper effects, such as pausing networking altogether, which changes the way many professionals think about career progression. On the other hand, workplaces romances — appropriate and inappropriate both — are on a pause and paygaps are squashed by everyone getting less. No matter how you look at them, the changes are profound.

Thirdly, ‘after work’. Naturally, notions of ‘Shakespeare wrote his greatest work during quarantine’ [6] have been replaced by gluttony, Netflix, and depression as the usual drivers for discipline were demolished. The psychological division between work, hobbies, sleep, and social life is gone. As days of quarantine turn into weeks and into months, the perception of time becomes perverse as there are no fault lines to rely on.

What is to be done? Crucially, the elephant in the room needs addressing — no one knows when quarantine will end. If Covid-19 becomes endemic, we may need to bunker down again for significantly longer than we expected [5]. Social distancing should be embraced as the new reality. Then human effort can be aimed at creating new ideas to retain prosperity, and conventions befitting novel confines can help us maintain interpersonal relationships. Such a way of thinking needs propagation to become the new status quo.

Lock the working hours of employees to what they would be doing at the office. Disallow finishing presentations at 3 am on a Sunday, and force compartmentalisation. Working from home should not mean living at work. Services firms, especially those that rely on creative mindsets, would benefit from helping employees maintain routines and sleeping patterns. Healthier, calmer, and more focused workers will bring higher productivity and better ideas. Even an email to employees starting the conversation in this direction would go a long way to make working culture healthier.

Practical advice can be condensed to calling for governments to bring closure to the ‘new normal’. Government should explain that people should not ‘survive’ under self-isolation, but learn to accept it as something potentially long term. Such an admission will expand planning horizons of people and businesses. And frank communication builds social trust — an element so crucially missing right now. The full armoury of over-communication techniques can be deployed to meet this objective, by state and private organisations– live public question and answer sessions, libraries of practical advice, internal employee ‘town halls’ to name but a few.

On a higher level, a new social dialogue about the rules and conventions governing quarantine should begin. Here is where communications of all levels should step up and provide a vision of an alternate world in which quarantine is not a bug but a feature. To rebuild trust, improve mental health, and increase productivity, an acceptable normalising narrative of the quarantine should be constructed. We should accentuate its benefits and try to transpose elements of normality such as a routine, onto the quarantine regime. The cultural shifts outlined require over-communication from business and state leaders alike. The virus has changed the definition of ‘normal’. We should catch up and re-learn to live.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/world/coronavirus-domestic-violence.html

[2] https://acmedsci.ac.uk/file-download/99436893

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-covid-19-misinformation-campaigns/

[4] https://time.com/5808278/coronavirus-anxiety/

[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-24/why-a-second-wave-of-covid-19-is-already-a-worry-quicktake?srnd=premium-europe

[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/03/broadway-shutdown-could-be-good-theater-coronavirus/607993/