Question

Review the following You Tube Wall Street Journal Video :

How Conoravirus Became A Global Pandemic WSJ

After you watch the video, state how Covid-19 has impacted organizations around the world. What are the implications?

Answer 1

Coronavirus began with one person in Wuhan who started showing the signs of pneumonia, from December 311 2019 – January 3, 2020, the cases soon reached 44 in Wuhan without any specific cause known to the Government of China. It was known that virus had spread from people who had visited the open-air Huanan Seafood wholesale market. The virus was spreading from one person to another and soon infected the entire city. As cases began to rise in China, the Government had to shut down its markets further leading to the loss of business.

Becoming Pandemic: Chinese new year was very near and millions of people travel across the cities at that time. Wuhan is connected to other Chinese cities with nearly 22,000 miles high-speed rails and its international airport has high footfall from other cities. People visit China for business purposes, China is known to be the manufacturing capital of the world. Due to this reason, people who had visited China during this time carried coronavirus with them to their own countries further creating it to be a global pandemic. The spread of virus came into account when a person traveling to Bangkok from China was diagnosed with coronavirus, this was the first case outside China. Soon cases started popping out in entire Asia and the US as well

In order to contain the virus, the Chinese Government had cut the transportation (rails and flights) to Wuhan (lockdown) to quarantine the patients who were infected. On Jan 30, 2020, with 7,818 cases globally; WHO declared coronavirus as global health emergency. Cases were confined to mainland China initially but soon cases started to show up in countries like Italy and Iran

Impact on Organizations: In order to prevent the spread of coronavirus across the globe, countries such as the US, UK, Italy, India, etc., had to spend millions to create facilities for patients to be cured. The virus has pulled the economy backward as these funds could have been used for development purposes. The complete lockdown was announced in order to ensure the safety of citizens further, impacting the organizations from a business standpoint. Businesses that involve manufacturing, agriculture, and chemicals were worse hit. Whereas, businesses providing services such as market research, IT solutions,etc., could be carried out by employees while working from home.

Although due to lockdown, people had to be in their houses due to which demand for goods and services had decreased drastically further impacting the profit margins for the companies. Sectors such as automobiles, tourism, manufacturing, etc., had to suffer high losses due to the rise of pandemic across the globe. The automobile industry was starring at unsold 2019 inventory proving to be a liability for them. These vehicles have to be written from the balance sheet in the end. Organizations are now not able to function at their full efficiency and are forced to operate at 30-40% efficiency. Due to lockdown, only the demand for essential products has remained constant. Non-essential items are forced to stay on shelves for a long time. Further causing loss to the manufacturing companies and trading agents involved in between

Implication: Organizations will have to spend more on getting their business off the ground, measures such as sanitization, masks, proper systems for monitoring employee's health will be implemented in order to maintain a safe environment at the workplace. Even after lockdown being completely lifted, organizations will work at 20-30% capacity to ensure the safety of its employees. Social distancing has to be followed at workplaces which will force the management to rethink the way their organizations are designed and change the seating plans according to the new norms. All this will act as an extra cost to organizations further reducing their profit margins in the long run

Moreover, it might take some time for the demand of non-essential products to rise. Coronavirus has brought the global economy to its knees and organizations will have to come up with new marketing strategies to promote their product after coronavirus. Organizations will also have to layoff employees in order to cut costs and keep their operations running, this will create unemployment across the globe.

Organizations will have to rethink how they do business and bring in the factor of coronavirus to understand how demand for their product/service will rise after pandemic