COVID-19 Pandemic: Understanding Its History And Its Future With Shawn Cupp

 

We are in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic that has since affected so many lives around the world. It has been testing the economy, public health infrastructures, and even our personal relationships. In this episode, Bob Roark tackles this pressing matter with someone who has a great deal of expertise about it, Shawn Cupp, Ph.D., the professor of Force Sustainment and Management at the Army Command and General Staff College. Shawn helps us understand COVID-19, comparing and contrasting it to what we’ve had before and helping us know how it will continue to affect us. Gathering up some news as well as scientific data, he informs us of the latest findings and development in terms of the creation of a vaccine. Shawn then taps into the many industries that are suffering because of the Pandemic, showing us the far-reaching implications that this will inevitably teach us for the following years to come.

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COVID-19 Pandemic: Understanding Its History And Its Future With Shawn Cupp

We have Dr. Shawn Cupp. He’s a PhD. He’s the professor of Force Sustainment and Management at the Army Command and General Staff College. Shawn, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Thank you for having me.

We’re going to do a little bit of something different. We’re going to talk about COVID-19. We’re in the midst of it and Shawn has a great deal of expertise and thoughts on it. I thought I would turn it over to Shawn. When we talked about it was compare and contrast what we’ve had before and some of the history and some of your thoughts about that.

There have been about thirteen different pandemics since the 1700s. The last major one that was worldwide was the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu that happened during the middle of World War I. It came from Kansas where I’m at. It went into Camp Funston and spread around the world. Historically, it was called the Spanish Flu because Spain was neutral during that fight and was the only one that would report on it. That has some significance now because China and some other news agencies are trying to blame people for what happened. We’re in the midst of somewhat weaponizing information about blame. Who did what? Who started this? That is something significant that’s going to happen in the outcome 3 to 5 years from now. We’ve also had a pandemic in Hong Kong and another flu in the late ‘50s and late ‘60s. Another pandemic was another H1N1 designated with swine, which was in 2009.

Each of these viruses, at least Coronaviruses, you have to remember a few things about them. They don’t need oxygen to live. They don’t produce any products. They don’t have to have any gender to reproduce. They are RNA-based, not DNA-based. When a water droplet that has COVID or SARS version two in it gets into your hands or you rub what we would call fomites like a computer screen or a door handle or a bag, you touch your mouth. That’s why we talk about washing your hands all the time. You wash your hands, you get rid of the virus. Its only way to reproduce is to get into your lungs and change the RNA, DNA the next cell beside it. That’s how it reproduces. When you cough or sneeze, then you expel that out. That’s why we have the ten-foot social distance requirements that have been put out by the CDC. That’s how you keep the virus moving from person to person. The other part of the science piece is the R0. How infectious is it? For example, if somebody had measles walks into a school, the R0 is about 12 to 18. That means it’s very infectious but has a low mortality rate.

As opposed to the various flus that we get vaccinated for, that have an R0 value of 1 to 2. If you walked into a room, maybe 1 or 2 people out of 10 would get the infection versus the COVID-19 infection rate is R0 3 to 5. If you walk into a room, 30% or 40% of the people in the room that are exposed to it will get it. Some unique things about COVID-19 are you can be asymptomatic and spread the disease. You can have no symptoms and spread the disease, which is different than 2002, 2003 when we have the SARS, which is the closest Coronavirus that this is to. It’s about 80% match, RNA-based. The way we controlled it was Toronto, China, the US put temperature sensors in the airports. You had to have a temperature to be symptomatic and spread it, so they could control it a lot easier that way. Suffice to say the rates are different in different countries as far as mortality. We have rates of around 4%. If you look at the entire globe, John Hopkins has on their GIS database dashboard. They’re also keeping it by country. In Italy, it’s around 8%. In Iran, it’s around 6.5%. Whereas a normal flu season is anywhere from 0.1% to 0.05%, so it’s a lot more deadly than what we would call a normal flu season.

When you think about that, a normal flu season here, if I had the flu and it’s bad enough, I go to a local emergent care or whatever. Do you think that’s influenced because they know what to do with the existing flu that we’ve had available? Do we know how to treat and manage the symptoms?

That’s one, but the other thing that is dramatically different about this is since the ‘40s, we’ve had a vaccine for flu. You get a vaccine that’s a cocktail of the last 2 or 3 flu seasons and you have some immunity to it. Also, if you’re like yourself or myself and you lived through several of these pandemics, you have a herd immunity to the flu.

For the people that don’t know what herd immunity is, let’s dig into that a little.

If you’re alive during a pandemic and you survived it, like the people that survived 1918 Spanish Flu, their body built up immunity, antibodies to that virus. In the ‘50s when the next pandemic happened, they were much better able to fight off that virus versus being exposed to that virus for the first time in a pandemic form. If you live through several of these, and that’s the part that the science has not come back and yet said, once you have COVID-19, are you immune to it? We don’t know. That’s why the document that came out that was published by the Imperial College in the UK about non-pharmaceutical interventions, they’re talking about eighteen months with waves of illness. The reason they’re talking that is because they don’t know if you’re immune to the virus once you’ve had it. There’s a lot of science it has to go into that. We’re worried about trying to come up with treatments because you don’t prevent the virus unless you come up with a vaccine. We have treatments which can be various drugs, RNA-based drugs.

That’s why things like if you have underlying illnesses, what we call comorbidity, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, a compromised immune system, you have a higher risk of actually dying from the disease. That’s the people that are affected the most with this virus. That being said, this eighteen-month planning window is because we don’t know if you’re immune once you get it. China said they stopped having community spread person-to-person of the virus. Their curve is supposedly going to stop going up and flatten. That means everybody and in the Hubei province eventually is going to start going back to school, back to work. If they didn’t catch the virus, they can catch it again. If they caught the virus, we don’t know if they can catch it again. This might spike again. It took us about six months to get the SARS genome up on the web in 2002, 2003. It took us one day to get the genome for COVID-19 up on the web.

It took us two years to get a vaccine. I heard we are already giving vaccination and some trials to people in Washington State because they’re so far along in the progression of the disease, we’ve given them the opportunity to take this trial vaccine to see if it will help. The curve that we are looking at is the curve of how fast can we get not necessarily preventatives, but treatments, various drugs that we’re doing, but also how do we get a vaccine that we can start giving people? The demographics across the globe, over 60, you’re at risk. If you’re over 80, you’re three times at risk. If you have comorbidity or underlying health conditions, you have a much greater risk no matter how old you are. The 2009 pandemic, there are certain demographics that are more risks than everybody else. For example, if we go back to 1918, the people that died were from 18 to 44-year-olds. They had the highest death rate.

 

A 44-year-old in those days was old.

The 18 to 44-year-olds were the ones that did all the work. We were a 50% agrarian-based economy, 50% agrarian-based society and that’s what slowed down productivity, slowed down a lot of business because we didn’t have anybody to do the work. There was a bunch of young people left and a whole bunch of older people left. The people that were the two generations that did all the work, were almost severely affected.

As you think about the Spanish Flu experience and again, societal differences, age and how long you lived in a lifespan were different. We’re way past being an agrarian society. I would say that we’re more of a service-based high tech somewhat manufacturing society. From that perspective, what do you think the compare-contrast between potential supply chain interruption is from then to now?

The biggest thing then was food. A farmer fed between 18 to 20 people. Production agriculture is only about 1.5% of the population. However, it’s about 17% of the GDP. A farmer feeds between 120 to 140 people. It’s vastly different because of technology, research, land grant universities that were set up in post-reconstruction, that were set up to do research after the reconstruction. Those all began to bloom after the ‘20s and ‘30s as far as being able to produce more food with fewer people with more mechanization. We have even more people that grow even more food than we did back in 1918. What does that mean to business in the future? That means that tariffs are going to probably double or triple with some nations like China, but they’re going to pay it because they need soybeans. They also had a devastating swine Coronavirus that impacted large portions of their swine population that they’ve started importing more and more from us and other countries.

What I see us going towards is more self-sufficiency, more industry that is going to be for Americans so we don’t have supply chain issues with pharmaceuticals, ventilators, N95 masks, with all the equipment that we’re going to find out, we don’t have enough of or we can’t distribute fast enough. The days of defense civil servant when we had post World War II where we had large food stocks, water and things set up for whatever would happen with nuclear war. I can see us going back towards that because once this goes through the population, whether it’s one wave or two waves, people are going to be more dependent to be self-sufficient to themselves. What does that mean to a business owner? That means some things are going to fundamentally change in the production and manufacturing sectors. Some things are going to fundamentally change in the agriculture sector.

The productions, I remembered the entire theory that was talked about just in time inventory. You have somebody to make this widget and somebody makes the red widget and they’re all theoretically supposed to trickle in here right at the right time and then we can do that. Do you think that’s going to be dissipated?

I’m a Desert Storm veteran, so I believe in the just in case. The just in case is the iron mountains had a purpose. If we look at the military or we look at the military support to civil authorities, which is a niche area that I’m quite familiar with, which we are working in. The hospitals, the ships, the equipment, the doctors, all that we’re expanding not only from the military side but also the fourth pillar of VA is to help support the nation in this time of need. You’re talking about logistics and it’s not in time, it’s just in case. Where do we find more ventilators? Where do we find more hospital beds? Where do we find more oxygen? Where do we find more healthcare workers? Where do we find more capacity to treat these patients? When you start talking about mortality rates, there’s a number of those people that get sick that if they have a ventilator, oxygen or if they have medical care, they will survive. As we see in Italy and probably also in Iran, they have less capacity. They have less capability and it’s going to be reflected in our mortality rate. How many of those people there if they got sick here, would survive?

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That’ll be interesting on the data skew. There’s the Belt and Road Initiative where there’s supposed to be the railroad from China and to Europe. You look at the incidences of outbreaks and concentrations of outbreaks along the belt and road of it. If we come up, there’s some discussion that you and I talked about before we started, the hydroxychloroquine. They’re talking about that has some level of efficacy in treating the symptoms at least.

That’s what you’re doing. You’re treating the symptoms. You’re trying to make the body as comfortable as possible so that you can intake oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide. You can still do metabolic. You can still breathe. You can survive the viruses’ attack on your body. That’s why people with various health conditions are more susceptible to the disease because simple things like breathing are incredibly hard, especially with this virus. Based on what I’ve seen in symptoms, it’s like breathing underwater because it gets so labored. As opposed to the regular flu, which would be headaches, body aches, other things that may happen to you as far as symptoms go.

I saw Bayer is going to donate 2 or 3 million of hydroxychloroquine derivatives that they were going to make available. The stuff is well-known. It’s been around for 70 years as I understand it. Is it an anti-malarial?

It is an anti-malarial. There’s a group of antimalarials and it’s one of the ones. If you look at some of the nations that have COVID-19 that have had malaria, they have fewer incidents of COVID and that’s where they’re coming up with this might have some efficacy for everybody that gets COVID-19.

I think about the business owner out there that’s dealing. For the business owners and so on, when we’re past all this and we have some idea whether there’s a vaccine or not, we’ll be posting this and we’re not all going to die as many are running around being emotional about it. What do you think you’re going to see societally or business world or changes that’s going to happen?

You’re going to have even more social media contact rather than a concert. You’re going to have more social media streaming services rather than going to a theater. You’re going to have communications like we’re doing that is going to become happenstance. It’s going to be like getting up in the morning and shave. It’s going to be what you do every day. Telework will not be some strange ubiquitous concept that only people that do hedge funds or whatever work that way. More businesses are going to be that way. It may cause some fundamental shifts in the way we operate.

We’ve gone from a manufacturing industrial age to service, to an information age. They may go back to a service age and the service is going to be different. For example, small business owners like restaurants, a lot of them are going to go out of business. Some of them will fundamentally change the way they do business and it will be like the Airbnb model where you order food and it shows up instead of you going out. We already eat about 30% to 40% of our meals out. One of the other things that have come out in the past several years is that we waste about 40% of our food because we want perfect apples and pears. We want to go to the store and get strawberries every month of the year. Less of that will happen. When I was in Europe, you had a refrigerator that would carry 2 to 3 days’ worth of food, not the giant refrigerators and freezers we have in the US that we carry weeks of food in.

It may fundamentally change the way houses are built because of how cabinets and kitchens are made. Do we cook or do we eat out? Do we bring in? Are we going to be more self-sufficient? You would have to go through a whole a tool and die generation. I don’t know if this generation will be impacted enough where this fundamentally shifts their values and their desires back to an earlier age where you grow your food or you grow a portion of your food like what my great grandparents grew up with after the Spanish Flu and into the Depression. I don’t know if it’s going to fundamentally shift that, but it will shift some of the service industry. It’s going to shift some of the streaming industry. I’ve stated for decades that agriculture is a strategic national security asset. It is something we take for granted because too few people are employed in the production part of it. Everybody talks about paying farmers not to grow food. People don’t understand the economics of agriculture that it’s inelastic, not an elastic economic supply and demand. People don’t understand what that means because you can only have one time to grow an item versus you can start and stop and assembly line a number of times.

 

The only thing that’s helped us agriculturally is we’ve got the Chiles of the world that are able to take and produce in their summer, which is our winter. We have freight that brings it in time effectively.

I can see us doing more indoor, more hydroponics, more self-sufficient where we’re not importing. We’re going to grow more of our own food. Does that mean we shut down the borders? I don’t know. I can tell you back in ‘97, there was an FMD, Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in Taiwan and Taiwan was a giant pig farm if you didn’t know that. It had eight million pigs. They were the local source of pork for the Pacific Rim. They’ve never come back from that because they had to destroy all the animals.

It’s hard to breed that many animals if you don’t have a breeding stock to start with. It’s large numbers.

We’re one of the fresh beef producers that’s not Foot and Mouth Disease vaccinated in the world. We’re going to take some of those things and apply them and leverage them. I also think we’re going to condense and become more self-sufficient in a lot of areas, agriculture being one of them. It’s the service industry and streaming services will be where you put your money. I’ve already heard we’re going to stop people like China from buying up the industry. They bought Smithfield.

They also bought Syngenta.

If you go out in the Midwest, there are large tracks of land that are inside of fund purchases that are made by large outside interest groups. That’s where some of the net value of farm-land is generated by how a foreigner can inject more money and use this as a hedge against inflation or hedge against the markets. Some of that may go away based on the fact that we may become more isolated as a nation because we want to keep ourselves from being attacked or influenced by another pandemic. A lot of people said this is a 100-year pandemic.

A 100-year that happens every ten years.

I don’t think that’s true. This is a new virus. It’s a novel virus and I don’t think that’s going to change. That may happen again and again. Once we lived through this, 6 or 9 months or however long it’s going to take, some fundamental political and regulatory changes are going to happen. It may or may not be involved with the election, but they will be involved with the people of the nation saying, “We want to have travel, but we don’t want to have all the risk of the travel. We want to be able to go on a cruise ship, but we don’t want to have the risk of going on a cruise ship. We want to have food, but we don’t want to have shortages.” Those kinds of things are going to change in the future.

Do you think the educational curriculum for children is going to change based on this?

It already started changing. I’m the youngest in the Baby Boomer generation or one of the youngest and that I came through vocational education. That’s what my Bachelor’s and Master’s is in. There are too many trades that do not have people involved because we went to the information route. We went your code head, a wirehead, that’s in cyber. That’s where you need to go. There are a whole lot of tradesmen that are required because all of us are going to retire and there are not going to be enough people that fill us back in. There are too many plumbers, electricians, draftsmen, toolmakers, and that may have some impact in the future that this may cause us to go back. Vocational education may have a comeback of some sort in some areas because we want to become more self-sufficient. We want to be able to do what we need to do without outsourcing everything.

Do you think offshore manufacturing is going to repatriate?

Some of it will, but I don’t know. It depends on what we need. This may be significant enough that medical equipment, medical supplies, and medical protective equipment may come as a premium and maybe we’ll discover we need to have stock files on hand. Maybe some of that may come back. I don’t know about the rest.

You wonder if you have in just time 3D printing. There was a valve story on ventilators or breathing machines. They were short, they took the 3D printer and printed them on the site. I don’t know about intellectual property rules, but they went around that and did their thing.

They were trying to get sued. The manufacturer said it was a copyrighted or patented process or some craziness. I don’t know how all expanding the defense act that the president signed is going to have on the industry, but it’s going to have some impact on the industry. Maybe it will have some impact in the production areas of the industry sector. Some of the things that we need, we don’t have enough of. That may provide seed money or may provide grants. It may provide the ability to provide jobs and production of those things. I don’t know where they are.

As we look across the country and trying to ramp up in the medical world, we have the docket of boxes and then we have the major groups that own the hospital chains and some for-profit and others. In your opinion, what do you think is going to happen to the medical community or system in the country after this?

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I can tell you that from my hometown back in Virginia, one of those companies bought the local hospital and it has been running less and less effectively since then. This may show that we don’t need that. We need them to be not being run by an equity-producing company. Like the online education field where we have people selling shares of whatever company that runs the 3, 4 or 5 different major online degree programs and their stock is being traded online. Some of those have gone out of business. More of that will come about. It’s the same thing as what has happened in some of the financial industry years ago is some of those will go away. Some of those healthcare, HMOs, massive corporations, they’re either going to go under or the local community is going to have such scrutiny on their practices whether they’re valid or not. This may show how good or not good some of those medical facilities are being run. Some of that may go away. More of it is going to be local. This is going to be like politics. It’s all local. More and more people are going to look at where the goods and services at my house, in my local community, are. There may be some opportunity in urban centers that are not serviced the way they should be with medical facilities.

The telemedicine is coming on in this crisis.

The directly opposite category is all the rural. You have many rural hospitals that have been shutting down. There are 3 or 4 here in the local community that stopped having 24-hour surgery care in the past few years because they couldn’t do it. It was not profitable.

It makes you wonder if they’re going to ramp up the number of physicians that are coming out. You wonder if you could have physicians like a civil service physician’s core.

I don’t see that happening in the short-term. Maybe it will come out in the long-term, but it takes so long to make one.

It’s like Special Forces. You can’t take an apprentice Special Forces guy.

We tried doing that back in about ‘06, ‘07 and ‘08. We had a program where we had infantry soldiers come in. They were eleven X-rays. They go through basic AIT, airborne school and go to the Q-course. That’s because we were short with Special Forces soldiers. The washout rate was horrendous. It does not work. Those are grown. They’re not printed.

We’ve talked about many things and circling back to the pandemic frequency, do you have any thoughts on why we see this repetitive frequency of pandemics? Is it travel or is it conditional?

It’s a little bit of both, but it’s also a third piece, which is where do these things come from? They come from bats, cats, and camels. Those are the reservoirs for various Coronaviruses, just like flu is indigenous to the gullet of Asian birds. There’s an Asian bird that has H3N5 in its gullet somewhere and somebody has to pick it up and handle it to get that version of the flu. Based upon how it does more, can that flu go via human transmission, community spread? How does it work? If you look at all the pandemics even back into the bubonic plague, it was travel that caused that. It had nothing to do with people not being able to survive. It was about ships going from one place to another as planes do with incredible ease.

You can see how fast somebody from somewhere else touches something on a plane and you get on that plane and then you move somewhere else. That’s the way biology is. It only wants to survive like the rest of us. The way it does is very unique. We carry it around. For every virus, there is, we’ve got a way to shut it down. Especially for this one, unlike SARS, you don’t have to have a temperature to spread it. That’s why we were able to control SARS to the extent we were. We don’t have a vaccine for this. Once we get a vaccine for it, it won’t be an issue or it won’t be as big an issue, but then something else will. To circle back to the R0 infectability and mortality, those two rubrics measure every kind of disease. For example, Ebola. It’s a 40% to 60% mortality rate. It has an R0 value of 5 or 6. The problem is it burns itself out before it can be transmitted so far, that’s why so many people can’t get it as opposed to influenza or this virus. Not as many people die, so they can spread it on and on.

 

We’ve talked about the R0 ratio. Let’s say that we have a fairly good dataset. We understand the mortality ratio depending on your age, segmentation and comorbidity issues or whatever. We have the advent of a series of drugs that manage the symptoms well. I suppose that will affect the R0.

It won’t affect the R0 because it’s still spread. It will affect the mortality rate because some of that treatment for the virus will be such that those people will live instead of not being able to be treated. That plus oxygen, plus a ventilator, those are three components for people, especially to those who have comorbidities or especially people with age. That’s the only way they do survive. Younger people survive because they have better immune systems. They have usually healthier lifestyles and their body is not beaten down by 60 or 70 years of life, of living through some of the things we’ve lived through.

When you’re talking to other people out, and you’ve been doing a fair amount of speaking on this topic, what are the things that you hear most from the audience that’s listening or the government officials that you’re talking with? What are they worried about?

I would suggest the students that we deal with are worried about transmission. We had a couple of cases that became positive in our county in Kansas. That brings it closer to home. Everybody’s a lot antsier, a lot more anxious about what’s going to go on. A lot of people that are in uniform don’t know what to think of it. Going into combat is one thing, but trying to deal with something you don’t see is not like anything. They’re not terrorists. They’re not bad guys. They’re not the Nazis. You can’t do ISR. You can’t do intelligent preparation on the battlefield. You can’t do any of that stuff and know what you’re going to have happened because there are too many variables to how this thing gets spread, how it goes from one person to the next.

Even though the mortality rate is about 1.8%, 1.5% in the US, a lot of that is because we haven’t found the people that have it. One of the things that people don’t understand because it’s such a historic event, we don’t entrust ourselves to read and learn from history. That’s something that we don’t do. Everybody takes history a different way and history is written by the winners, all the different analogies you’ve heard about history. If you read a couple of books on the Spanish Flu, you figure out that more military members died for the Spanish Flu than died in World War I if you look at the total numbers. People don’t realize how virulent it was. The military-age people were who had been affected the most.

They’re all in a group. You can’t say, “I want you to take the hill, but by the way, stay ten feet apart.”

There can’t be more than six of you in a room. It’s very hard. That’s why I’ve found a niche in the whole defense support civil authorities. How do we deal with hurricane, floods, tornadoes, civil disturbance? All that, that is a mission set that is fraught with authorities, fraught with legalities, fraught with acts like Posse Comitatus. What can a Title 10 active duty soldier do versus a Title 10 reserves soldier? What’s the Title 32 national guard? What can they do or not do law enforcement wise? All those things, we don’t know enough about it because we have to concentrate on warfighting because that’s our number one mission is to fight and win ground combat in a coalition and joint operations. This whole virus is unlike anything many people have dealt with in our lifetime. Because we don’t have many people from 1918 that are still alive, virtually nobody, it’s a forgotten memory for all of us, except those that have talked to somebody that lived through it. People between the ages of 30 to 40 virtually have no idea. They heard about the 2009 pandemic, but they don’t know what that is.

From my memory in ‘09, the market had crashed in ‘08, ‘09 and that was front and center. The 2009 virus, I was almost like, “I’d never catch anything,” so I am not paying attention to it at all.

The history, we don’t do enough. You’re asking about education. Being able to study how we reacted in the past and we talked briefly about the curve. Because this is unique, we call it a black swan if you want to or whatever, a once in 100 years pandemic. In my opinion, it is so unique and so different, we’re making decisions now we should have made weeks ago, and that’s at every level.

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It’s the learning curve.

Here’s the other part that I try to concentrate constantly on my students and my peers. You’ve got to be creative. Thinking about bad things or things that are possible is not a pessimist. You’ve got to think of the problem. What is the problem? That’s the thing fundamentally I’ve been asked for 30-some years of federal service, military, and civilian. The problem is this. There are different problems all over the place that deal with this virus. The problem that’s front and center is whatever you have to deal with every day. Are you self-isolating because you got exposed to somebody or are you worried about taking your kids to a daycare center? Are you worried about going out to get groceries and getting into a civil disturbance to somebody or toilet paper? There are different problems for different people. One of the issues that are unique is some of the things we should have been doing two weeks ago or a month ago, we didn’t. Thinking about telework, thinking about how we are going to deliver instruction in a different way.

One of the things that were bold locally, it was the Governor of Kansas saying, “School is over.” I told my son that and he didn’t believe me. “It’s over. I wasn’t alive in 1918, but I can see the writing on the wall. We’re done. You’re not going to be running track. I’m sorry.” I can’t emphasize enough being creative and critical and innovative thinking about what’s next. What are the possibilities? We’d constantly tell our students, “You’re going to have about 60% or 70% of the information, you’ve got to make decisions.” “I need more.” “No.”

I understand wanting more. If you had more, how much more can you have before it’s no longer intel in its data?

It’s not actionable anymore because it doesn’t add to it. Where do I go down the lane? Left or right or the middle, it doesn’t matter anymore because that extra 10% of data or information didn’t help me. It filled in some of the gaps, filled in some of the blanks, but it didn’t help me.

When I think about the opportunity versus risk and you go amongst any of the difficulties that you have and in any event, you go, “I understand to the extent I count the risk. Where’s the other side? Where’s the opportunity? What can I do to manage the opportunity or manage the risk? How do I be smart about this?”

When you do Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, a SWOT Analysis of whatever. If you look at the strengths here, the US strengths include our infrastructure, especially in the medical field. Our weaknesses are probably our ability to act because we don’t know how fast to act.

It’s also political. If the president could stand up and go, “We’re all going to do this,” and then the party says it’s an election year and go, “No, I don’t think so.”

That has more to do with it probably than if it was an election year. If this happened in a non-election year, there would be vastly different things that would be happening from the federal level at least. Opportunities in the future as far as business is concerned, there are certain sectors that are going to shrink and contract, but other sectors, streaming, service, service to your door, streaming to your door. The ability to do a lot more from your home because no matter how long this lasts, three weeks, three months, six months, nine months, people are going to get into some rhythm. They’re going to understand what they can and can’t do and they want to take advantage of it because that’s something else we do. We take advantage of what we have.

To finalize it, the biggest threat we have is going back to the way it was. This is a once in 100 years. We can go back to outsourcing our supply chains. We don’t need rare earths. We don’t need whatever strategic materials we have. We don’t need that, we can get it from somewhere else. Going back, that would be backward steps that probably is not a good fiscal policy, much fewer future opportunities for businesses or the government or anybody. We’re going to become more self-sufficient. We’re going to become less dependent upon foreign trade partners unless it’s things like agriculture, steel, something that we produced, that we want to make, that we can get the world to buy. The question is are we going to be able to sell all that or are we going to use it all ourselves?

 

That’s a challenge. It was funny I was thinking of what’s the unintentional benefit of having less people on the roads, more people working from home? One, I saw where Netflix is going to reduce some of their service to Europe so they can make sure they can deliver. If 5G was here, I doubt that would be the issue. I saw Venice, the canals are clear. They actually see the fish in the canals. My commute to work is like, “Are you kidding? Nobody is out there but me.” There are some unintended benefits. A lot of times what strikes me is people don’t know what they don’t know. The strategic value of being food self-sufficient, the strategic value of our rivers runs somewhere instead of the North Pole. They run south. We have big oceans on both sides. We have friendly neighbors, by and large. There are a lot of things that this country has that other countries don’t. A lot of the citizens don’t get it and don’t pay attention to it.

I don’t know societally if we will embrace some of that and some of that will be fostered, nourished, and understood by people that are going to make policy decisions in the next 5, 10, 20 years or not. How are they going to remember this event or this long series of events? They are going to remember it as we were fighting off an unseen enemy and we found some things that we need to do differently? Is it going to be political finger-pointing, who did what wrong when? Are we going to go even further and say, “This is all some nation state’s problem because they started it and it’s spread from them? We’re going to blame them for everything.” I could see it going in different ways. I don’t know which way.

If I was a nation-state that had multiple issues like this come from my eating behaviors or agricultural behaviors, note to self, change that. Quit doing that. You’re going to have to live without your bat soup. That’s thousands of years of culture. I don’t know how you do that with a light switch.

I don’t see that.

I’ve been quizzing you for quite some time and taking advantage of your knowledge, which I appreciate. For those who are reading, your gut feels based on what you’ve seen out there, what advice might you recommend to them and your prognostication of what you see on the other side of when we’re going to get to the other side?

We’re not near the crescendo. It’s going to take another 6 to 9 months. Probably before this level is off, this is going to come back. We need to prepare for it to come back. It may come back in this form, it may come back in another form. I can see some civil unrest probably in some of our major cities. I can see people going from hospital to hospital trying to get treatment for grandma or grandpa. If we don’t have a military national guard or police presence at pharmacies, grocery stores, and hospitals, I can see those becoming places where confrontation could happen. Markets are going to be uncertain continuously for a while. The Fed is going to pump trillions of dollars in to keep the market up. I hope some of that goes to small business owners. I hope that goes to some people like the restaurant service industries that are getting reduced. I don’t know if we went to the HUD and said, “We’re going to stop foreclosures and evictions,” but we’re going to do that nationwide because car payments and mortgages are the two largest things that people spend money on credit cards or student loan debt.

Houses and apartments and car payments, it may come to the point where somebody has got to step in and do something there because if we don’t, large portions of our population are going to be unemployed. It will be not a good time. It will not be good. I don’t know if what we’re doing is enough. I don’t know if that’s enough to stave this off. I know that many small businesses that are service sectors are not going to survive. This is what happens. They’re either going to survive or they’re going to have to modify. This will fundamentally change. Big box stores of whatever sort are going to go away because of things like Amazon and this that happened and say, “You can get whatever.” “I ordered online and I can get it in a day or two days.” I think more and more of social distancing is going to be okay. It will promote the fact that people are going to be happy living where they are and doing what they can do in their homes. Maybe outside, maybe not, but more and more we’re going to have ways to getting food and supplies that are basic household goods that I don’t know if people are going to continue to go outside and do that if this gets worse.

We’ve got the nursing home issue, challenges, and risks. It’s culturally acceptable in this country for elderly citizens to reside in a nursing home. I wonder if that’s going to change.

It may. I thought it was going to happen when you had the whole busload of them. After Katrina when they were trying to get out, go to Houston and they had that big fire on that bus. I don’t know how many of them died on that bus and the numbers that were left behind because they couldn’t get other nursing homes. We didn’t seem to change there, but as I say in my class, Katrina was a regional event. Superstorm Sandy was a regional event. All these were regional or even state events. This is a national event. This is a global event. There are some differences with size, scale, and scope that go along with that maybe will change some of the societal factors and what we value and what we don’t value in the future. I’ve got a mom and dad back home and my dad is taking care of my mom and they’re in a higher risk group because of their age. We move so much.

I’m ex-military, you’re military and you go, “Where did you live?” You go, “I need a longer piece of paper.”

Even our civilian population moves all the time. Some of that may change. Some of that may stop. People are going to find opportunities where they are versus, “I can get more from my buck if I go here or there.” They may take this time six weeks, six months, whatever it is and reevaluate where they are and moving might not be on the priority list anymore for another job opportunity because it will change.

Do you think that people’s opinion, like buying something inexpensively and they’re going to say, “Where was it manufactured?” Do you think that will start to evidence itself after this event?

I think so. The cheap China stuff and name brand market share is probably going to suffer. People like Walmart are not going to be able to have 70%, 80% of their stuff from China. It’s not going to happen. People are going to stop buying it for whatever reason. There might be 300 reasons. One might be grandma died in that COVID-19 of 2020. We’re not going to buy anything from China. The simple fact that we couldn’t get medicine or we couldn’t get bandages or whatever and they were made in China because of what’s happened with the supply chain. When it starts impacting electronics, that’s when it will have met the tipping point. It will take a while, but some of these other products, people will change their mind about where they buy what in the future.

I was trying to think of all the knock-on effects of this. Does it change how people take in and in their religion going to church? There are some of the major churches that tried doing it anyway and then there are some major churches that went online. What does that mean to the megachurch business?

All those forms of social gatherings, movies, churches, concerts, ballgames and sporting events. Something’s going to change with how they are distributed, how they are consumed, how they are managed. There may be some fundamental shifts in how we take in outside activities like that.

Have you had much interaction with the FDA and their approval process for treatments?

I have not. I’m quite aware. After The Jungle was published, we had these federal agencies that were born, USDA, Health and Human Services. You have the FDA that’s a subset of that. If you look at the POTUS and who sits around the table, the big wigs sit around the table. USDA and HHS sit around the table, but the FDA is in the pinochle gallery. The problem is USDA governs and manages certain food products and the USDA manages other ones. If you go through the book, Marion Nestle, who used to teach, she wrote the book, Food Politics. It goes through how the food industry runs nutrition and how it’s managed out is inspected. She has a page that talks about what gets managed by the FDA and what gets managed by USDA. It’s insane if the average American citizen understood that because it doesn’t make any sense. I can see some changes because of that. Maybe this will be another jungle that actually changes some of the ways we manage drugs, which may in effect change the way we manage food. I know that those federal institutions are going to change.

If you had a pill that was good for the blue thing over here and all of a sudden you have a red thing arrive and that pill would solve the red thing problem because FDA didn’t approve it for the alternative deal, that’s going to change.

The double-blind studies that take 6 to 8 years to finish that incrementally change somebody’s lifespan or ability to confront a certain disease are going to go by the wayside. We put the genome for this thing up in the cloud in 24 hours.

It was up in Oak Ridge. They started looking into the supercomputer, what drugs work on this type of event and they pushed it out across the scientific community.

There have been some side things like AIDS and some of the other things that weren’t peer-reviewed and came out in the public. That’s where I say where information is being weaponized, especially in the political arena, taking things that aren’t scientifically-based or were not peer-reviewed. Then thrusting them out and saying, “This is where it came from.” No, it’s not. Science says that this is a mammal-based disease. It didn’t come from some lizard, it didn’t come from a snake. FDA, USDA, GIPSA, Health and Human Services, some of those federal agencies are going to change their focus. National stockpiles of certain things are going to change. We’re going to be able to prevent maybe the extent of the impact of diseases in the future based on a fact we have simple things. Ventilators, oxygen, hospital beds and healthcare providers, those are the four things you need to have, no matter what it is.

We used to have a strategic merchant Marine even in World War II. I was thinking we have all these cruise ships that are idled. We’re supposed to have all of this overflow from patients on coastal cities. Why wouldn’t you move a cruise ship off of a coastal city?

That’s why Mercy and Comfort, the two Navy ships, are going to California and New York because there are 1,000 beds on each one of those. They’re going to the right places but that’s it. That’s our strategic reserve. We have some mobile hospitals in the reserves Title 10 comp of three. Your US Army Reserve, they’re going to probably pull out ventilators, probably healthcare providers, to supplement what we’re doing. They’re going to go to the VA and their fourth pillar is helping in times of disaster with hospital beds, ventilators, oxygen, and healthcare workers. We do have strategic reserves. CRAF, the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, we have a very segmented, proportional, structured way.

The last time we did it of any note was in Desert Storm where we said, “Civilian airlines, you will do this and we’ll pay you, but we’re going to use you for our travel. When in times of need, these are segmented 1, 2, 3, 4 call-ups and we’re going to need your planes to move troops.” We don’t have that of the same magnitude in the healthcare field. We have some of that. Some of the Defense Production Act, we started coming up with some of that. It’s not set up the way we do with CRAF. It’s probably a model that somebody hopefully will be smart enough in the federal government to come up with, “Maybe we should have this with providers, both private and public, where we asked them to do these types of things in national disasters ordered or are called.”

I think about how the country usually works when they get tasks to get significant. 2008 was the time frame and there have been others and the country seem to take the best and brightest, get really busy and there are solutions that come from it. I hate for this to be the catalyst. 9/11 was certainly a catalyst for many changes and I suspect this thing will be seen as a tipping point as well.

Hopefully, some of the mistakes of 9/11, post-political decisions that we made, where we went, what we did, how we went can be learned so that this time we don’t make some of the same mistakes.

The biggest threat we have is going back to the way it was. Click To Tweet

One would like to think so. Maybe we’ll make a new mistake, not the old ones. Shawn, this has been interesting and fascinating. I appreciate you sharing your perspective and insights. It’s been good and timely.

You’re quite welcome. I appreciate the opportunity.

You mentioned Camp Funston and the Spanish Flu. I spent a memorable summer at Camp Funston personally. It’s a lovely spot, the old barracks in Fort Riley. I appreciate it so much. If people wanted to reach out to you directly, how would they find you?

I’m setting up a Running Blind YouTube channel. I’m in the middle of doing that. Also, contact me at my Gmail account, OShawnCupp@Gmail.com. I’m on LinkedIn. That is probably the easiest way to find me. I’ll be doing some other videos probably in this area that crosses a bunch of different sectors. It’s not just focused on biosecurity, food or defense. It’s the intersection of all those and things that we’ve talked about.

I look forward to staying in touch. Maybe when we get a little way down the road, we’ll circle back and go, “What did we get right and what did we miss?” It sounds like a plan. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• Dr. Shawn Cupp
• Food Politics
• OShawnCupp@Gmail.com
• LinkedIn – Shawn Cupp

About Shawn Cupp

Strategic and Operational Level Joint Military Sustainment

Homeland Security topics including student retention, domestic threat groups, agroterrorism, food, and agriculture security

Theater Security Cooperation (TSC) in Africa

Tobacco Cessation

Over 25 years using Microsoft office software and a decade of experience using Blackboard and SharePoint in the classroom and office environments for teaching and developing curriculum for graduate-level instruction. Demonstrated mastery using SPSS statistical software for quantitative data analysis and NVivo qualitative software analysis. Graduate education level uses Adobe Presenter and Adobe Connect in unclassified and classified environments for the purposes of presentations, graduate-level instruction, and classified briefings.

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