Elton Sherwin identifies proven best practices for reining in the coronavirus
When we interviewed Elton Sherwin 11 years ago about his book Addicted to Energy, he was busy with his career as Senior Managing Director at Ridgewood Capital. Now his LinkedIn profile says “retired.” But that’s not quite right. “I’ve re-invented myself as a Zoom presenter,” he says with a chuckle.
His topic is COVID-19: Lessons from Around the World. “Earlier this year, I began to follow numbers showing how Asia was doing well compared to the U.S. Out of curiosity I started researching, particularly the Asian democracies. That resulted in a white paper that summarized my result, which is now a presentation I’m doing once or twice a week via Zoom.”
The presentation identifies 12 things that Elton identified as best practices that are largely not done in the West. “This virus isn’t susceptible to a silver bullet,” he points out. “It’s important to do the 12 things in the right proportion.
“All of Western Europe and the U.S. tried to talk their way out of it. The results have been catastrophic. Fifty times more fatalities.
“It’s really shameful the cost to Americans in terms of citizen’s health, the quality of life, and economic consequences.”
Elton urges people to spread the word as outlined in his presentation. “It takes a lot of people to get the message to policy makers. It’s going to be a challenge, but at least now we know what has to be done, even if we aren’t doing it!”
He points out that the virus loves indoor spaces and people without masks. “The typical person doesn’t get infected beyond family members. But the super spreader events are a different story. Those events have been indoors where many people aren’t wearing masks.”
He says there are two things that Asia has done that will be hard for us to follow, which could add two years to the pandemic.
“We need to wrestle to the ground the foreign disinformation that ricochets around the world via social media. And every country that has nailed the infection rate close to zero has used cell phone data. We need to come to grips with the disinformation and and use the technology that we’ve developed. We need to elevate what can be done given the best practices in the world.”
Photos are from Elton’s presentation
