125178767_web1_preventable-hospital-6-16-20

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The news has started dribbling in, and odds are high we can expect more.
				In Wilkes-Barre Township, Bob Evans restaurant is shuttered and all signs have been removed. On Wilkes-Barre&rsquo;s Public Square, El Zocalo restaurant announced via Facebook it won&rsquo;t be re-opening after closing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Wilkes-Barre&rsquo;s S&W diner and Forty Fort&rsquo;s Beer Deli are also closed for good. Much of this and more have been outlined in a three part series about retail amid the pandemic, begun Sunday and ending Tuesday.
				There&rsquo;s precedent here, though not much. The world last grappled with a pandemic of this depth in 1918, and times were very different. Back then, there were about 1.5 billion people compared to nearly 8 billion now, commercial flight was four years old, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was nearly three decades in the future.
				It&rsquo;s hard to find concrete data from a century ago, but information gathered shows businesses were devastated. One study on the economic impact for Little Rock, Arkansas, found merchants reported a decline in business from 40 percent to 70 percent, and a collective average daily loss in business of $10,000 &mdash; $135,500 in 2006 dollars (the study was released in 2007 by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
				So hearing that area businesses won&rsquo;t be re-opening is hardly unexpected. What we don&rsquo;t yet know is how many will disappear thanks to the pandemic (and, as the series noted, how many would have closed soon anyway, though perhaps not this soon without the pandemic).
				&ldquo;If you had wanted to design something to destroy all dining, social and entertainment &mdash; all things people enjoy doing together &mdash; you couldn&rsquo;t have designed something better than the coronavirus,&rdquo; Larry Newman told staff writer Bill O&rsquo;Boyle for the opening story Sunday.
				The Diamond City Partnership executive director added &ldquo;It&rsquo;s simply too early to see trends.&rdquo;
				Yet the early information, he said, is encouraging. Many small retailers are turning to online retail to keep going. Others are finding innovative ways to build customer confidence with modified sales counters (lots of clear plastic), and built-in social distancing (fewer seats, six feet clearly marked on floors), as staff writer Patrick Kernan reported in Monday&rsquo;s part 2.
				Most of these changes will likely last months, some may become permanent. Other changes are coming.
				Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber of Commerce President Wico van Genderen brought up an obvious one: Our reliance on &ldquo;just in time&rdquo; supply chains &mdash; producing items as needed, avoiding the cost of warehousing spoiled perishables.The pandemic exposed the shortcomings of such a system. Think toilet paper shortage.
				Signs show business, overall, will rebound. Though Bob Evans closed, a Burger King is preparing to open. El Zocalo may be gone, but the owners previously operated El Rincon Latino for two years before closing in 2013 and rebooting their efforts at El Zocalo. Many programs are in place or in development, including through the Chamber, to help.
				When it comes to such resilience, the 1918 pandemic offers two basic lessons that still hold: 1) We need to keep practicing social distancing and other preventive measures until a vaccine is developed or the risk is otherwise substantially reduced, and 2) we need to learn the lessons this pandemic is teaching and reinvent the way we do things.
				&#8211; Times Leader

Our view: Lessons to be learned from COVID pandemic