Greetings! The usual, an old thread notice alert reminded me to check in here. My company has certified to a new ISO 20000 system this year but there isn't much to say about that. It's like ISO 9001, just a little different.
I wanted to pass on how the pandemic goes elsewhere, since most forum participants would probably be located in the States. I live in Thailand and the pandemic ended about three months ago here. We went 100 days without an in-country transmission (per the official stats; of course probably not really), and then some guy just had it. In that 100 days I've only heard of two non-quarantined visitors walking around with it, which really freaked people out (everyone is quarantined except exceptions, which are less common now). Related to the starting point theme here, modeling pandemic spread or reduction progression, Thailand just got lucky, and overreacted when there weren't that many cases yet. It helped that people conform to norms a lot more here.
So not much to say, right? Since Thailand had depended on foreign tourism (or maybe that was all tourism, counting domestic) for about 20% of their economic input the change stings, a lot. Foreign-oriented resort areas are all but shut down. At least essentially everything else is back to normal internally, but there's no way to just suck it up and take that level of impact. They'll need to figure out a plan B. The stop-gap has been for the government to offer vouchers to promote domestic travel, but then it's not as if people here can vacation anywhere else anyway.
To me it's obvious, to encourage longer stay visitors, people who might want to do 3 months to a year here. They just spent a decade kicking out a lot of under the table English teachers, fugitives from other countries, and grifters, so they're slow to embrace that.
I lived in Hawaii last in the US and it has been sad hearing about them dealing with the same issues. They had a mandatory two week self-quarantine in place, and maybe still do (I don't follow it that closely), with their economy also crashing. It's odd how a lot of people wouldn't necessarily feel that here; nothing has changed in what I do or see, except for everyone wearing a mask (we're just not going to drop that, apparently). I fully expect a ripple effect to keep causing economic impact here though, for disruptions and business closures to keep spreading effects.