A New Working Model: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic
1. Introduction Since the report of a serial of mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has already lasted for over 3 years. A lot of things have changed in our daily and professional life, most were unimaginable before this bizarre time. These include border closures, nation-wide lockdowns and people rushing to supermarkets for toilet papers. But not all changes are bad, and the future will likely embrace some of these positive changes such as flexible learning and working models and accelerated research on mRNA vaccine development and other scientific areas. In this blog post, the members of the ISEH New Investigator Committee will discuss our view on how the pandemic affect our working models as hematologists. 2. The old normal The old norm refers to the way things were done before the COVID-19 Pandemic. This would typically involve work and socialize in-person, travel freely and attend large gatherings. In academia, the old norm would