hey guys ECR G here back with another episode as you can see the title of this
episode is when will clinical trials be back to normal obviously the talk of the
town the talk of the world is about coronavirus the Cova 19 pandemic and
I've been getting flooded my emails have been flooded with people wanting to know
how they can get into the industry how they can get in the industry during the
pandemic making it even harder to get in the industry when will clinical trials
be back to normal all these questions about that so I'm gonna go into that
here in a second before I get into that in any with any depth I'd like to let
you guys know about the resume review program so for those that are trying to
get into the industry right now during the pandemic this is the time where you
want to make sure that your resume is at its best that your interview skills are
sharpened because when they open up they're gonna be hiring and they're
gonna be hiring a lot and hiring fast because there's so many new trials just
in the kovat space i don't know how many coordinators have been calling me or
I've been talking to over the past few couple weeks now it's even more the
recording of this episode it is currently May 14th 2020 I don't want to
know how many coordinators how many people I've been talking to saying
they're on Kovan 19 trials or how many companies that I never thought would be
running Kovan 19 trials are now running Kovan 19 trials so they're gonna need
staff to fulfill those trials so it looks like we're gonna be opening up
here pretty soon so currently I know of companies that are laying off on the
travel restrictions they're letting them expire I think most a lot of companies
will those will be expired by this Friday so today's Thursday so the 15th
so a lot of them are just gonna be expiring but monitors and people aren't
gonna be traveling just yet because pretty much all of my sites and most of
my other colleagues sites are still closed for monitoring at this time
there's still closed for research visits so I want you guys to keep in mind that
in clinical trials you're most of the time dealing with sick individuals so
you do not want them to be under any kind of on
do stress stress or undue harm by this virus they're already immunocompromised
they're already struggling with something that's why they're in the
clinical trial in the first place so sites gonna be extra careful about
having their patients come into the site which leads me to believe that we're
gonna still be not that resource clinics are still be closed for another few
weeks to patient visits they may still have they may have staff on site
starting to come back on site here in the next couple weeks a lot of my sites
have been saying that they don't have a date in mind but they are planning to
open soon you've got governor's mayor's elected officials all over the United
States have been saying I've been partially reopening there are usually
doing a phase one they're doing it in phases phase one phase two sort of like
clinical trials but they're doing it in phases of the reopening but I've got a
lot to say about this so first they're doing that in phases but the numbers
still increase the number of cases are increasing which is expected when you're
opening it back up but the death are increasing also are we going to get to a
point where we have to basically reverse course because the deaths are too much
just wait until some somebody famous or more famous people start dying from it
or someone or an elected official dies or an elected officials like close
family member dies because I still think a lot of people think you know it's not
gonna happen to them a lot of people there's a lot of people that think that
is not deadly it doesn't affect young people you know
the average age of the people that die are are pretty old but it can wreak
havoc on young people I was just watching the Joe Rogan podcast not long
ago and Michael yo was on there I think this is like literally two days ago
comedian but anyway he talks about his experience with kovat he literally
thought he was going to die and you know this is a guy who doesn't drink doesn't
smoke a pretty healthy guy but he thought he literally thought he
was going to die and he texted his parents and he said
and he said like he's not okay I mean of course to his wife and kids he was
saying you know everything's fine you know he's gonna battle through it but he
thought he was not gonna make it to his parent and he said that to his parents
he thought he was not gonna make it and it just goes to show that it just goes
it just goes to show that you know this is not just an old person's the thing
you've got to be careful so all that to say I think is still gonna be a while
before see arrays are allowed to travel on site
because the sites are just gonna be closed to them still most of my sites
are still closed for CRA visits even though the states may have opened up
hard to reopen the economy but I still think it's gonna be a while I'd say
about two three more weeks before CRA is really start traveling again and even
then it's gonna be different I've got sites in DC I'm thinking I'm a
drive you know that's less than a four hour drive I'm thinking I may not fly
and I miss the person I hate driving I hate driving with the passion usually I
fly anywhere you know I'll fly an hour away if I have to so and you know the
dis just goes this just goes to show that no one knows no one really knows
what's gonna happen you know this is just my prediction but the cases are
rising fast as we reopen people and people start to think that if you reopen
everything's back to normal again everything's fine again because they're
reopening which is not the case the cases are rising the deaths are rising
you know President Trump outlined a bunch of guidelines to reopen
he's not even following these guidelines for states to follow these guidelines
until they reopen and one of them is consecutive days of plateaued or
decreased cases not a single state that has reopened has had that where their
cases are plateaued or decline now I do think certain states certain areas are
more rural they may have our separation ie Texas ie
southern states and you know safe places like New York
City they should probably hunker down for the longest time because everyone's
so congested together and that's going to increase the susceptibility of the
population and things of that nature more people are gonna get it but in
other places they can probably open a little bit faster but what's happening
is these places are reopening people think it's okay
so they're congregating in these places and then you get these huge swells of
people with the coronavirus and no one knows what kind of effect they're gonna
have from it they don't know if it's gonna be largely asymptomatic they don't
know if they're gonna have mild systems they'll know if they're gonna have
severe symptoms and end up in the hospital in worst case they may die and
because it seems to be happening fast so there's a lot still unknown about this
thing and you know but the best thing you can do is just to take your own
precautions and really put matters into your own hands I'm not one where I want
to risk this so I'm gonna be taking extra precautions as in flying as little
as possible driving where I can putting my sights in
New York at the end of my visit is scheduled putting it putting them way
out there borderline may not even be going may be
delaying it because that's really a hotbed right now for the corona virus so
I'm definitely gonna be going to my more rural sites first I'm talking Florida
I'm talking to North Carolina I'm talking Ohio I'm talking those type of
places and then I'm gonna leave New York City and DC to weigh in the in the
future when things have calmed down even more hopefully where there's at least a
treatment hopefully as bad guys it's bad it looks like the momentum I've just
been feeling the momentum over the past few weeks just driving around seeing way
more people when we first started the self quarantine there was nobody on the
roads and I was actually really really nice I'm not gonna lie I'd go out for
walks I'd be at a walk across the street could be like one car every like ten
minutes coming it was awesome the birds were chirping the birds
that the squirrels loved it the rabbits the deers loved it they all loved it but
now the momentum I've just seen the momentum now it's basically back to
normal when I go around outside you know there's traffic at five o'clock
when I go outside there's a whole bunch of traffic throughout the day like
normal and I'm still thinking like where are these people going still a lot of
stuff is closed gyms are closed restaurants are closed
you know non-essential stores are closed so where are these people going I don't
know where they're going it is crazy you know all the parks are
closed so I don't understand what these people are going but they're out there
and so the momentum is just coming to a head where people are not trying to self
quarantine anymore they're not trying to be held at home anymore
whether that be for financial reasons they want to get back to work or that
just be there and see where that just means they're being soft and don't want
to follow the guidelines and you know Americans we have a little rebellious
streak in us it's part of our DNA part of our culture so you know they'll
comply for a little bit but after a while they're just not going to comply
for the sake of not wanting to comply that's just how we Americans are so
that's just how it is guys but the momentum is clearly going in the
direction where people are going to continue to go out to be about
regardless of the risk regardless of what people are saying they should do
what the experts are saying they're just not gonna be held in the house anymore
so what does that mean that probably means there's gonna be
another spike of coronavirus that probably means is gonna get worse I'm
crossing my fingers hopefully it doesn't but you know that's just what it is so
as its effect on clinical trials obviously clinical trials is an industry
that has a lot of travel and you know the stakeholders in the industry ie the
patients they're at risk of this so I mean what happens when a patient gets
the coronavirus what happens if a study coordinator
gets the coronavirus and passes it to the patients
these are things we got to think about when we're reopening clinical trials or
going back to on-site monitoring the other things we got to think about you
know how do you conduct a monitoring visit when everything's closed no Jim
you know no restaurants that's one of the things they've been sending out to
you know company-wide and these companies have been sending out is look
you're not gonna do monitoring business because the site is closed you're only
gonna be able to do monitoring visits if you know there's a checklist if you know
restaurants are open if you know hotels are open and they're doing their their
best to be clean about it there's a whole bunch of checklist going but until
that happened you're not going to be able to travel that way or you're gonna
be under an advisory to travel to that place it's not advisable for you to do
that so like I said the Corning of this is May 14th 2020 of course this thing
changes daily weekly so who knows what's gonna happen next week but I like coming
on here doing these updates from my perspective about what's going on in the
clinical trials industry and what's going on dealing with coronavirus so of
course I'll do another update next week and I'll be doing updates pretty much
until this thing is over this is we're living an interesting time guys very
interesting time so as far as when job when they'll be hiring back for jobs
I want another thing I want to talk about to there were the remote work this
industry is built for remote work a lot of the jobs
my first job well one of my first jobs in the industry project management
assistant I could have did that whole job from home there's so many jobs in
clinical project management that can be done coolly from home there's so many
jobs just in the world that could be done from
because most the time you're going into the office and you're going to sit at a
computer with internet access to do your work or whatever it is you could do that
at home most of the time you can collaborate with people from home you
can get on meetings get on calls now it's not as good as in person but it's
still it'll work you just had a company like Twitter come
out and say you know most literal employees would bill to work from home
if not all of them will be able to work from home so that's the few that's
probably what's gonna happen a lot of companies probably thought that they
weren't capable of working from home it affect the culture blah blah blah blah
blah well now they're forced to work from home so we'll see I'm sure we're
gonna see a bunch of companies come out and say our employees are allowed to
work from home now and is that the new normal so basically people are allowed
to go out at their own risk it's on them it's not they're going they're not going
out for a company for their company so we'll see commercial Real Estate's gonna
get crushed probably because of this no more office buildings you know people
gonna have offices in their house maybe people all by bigger houses so they can
have two offices mom and dad could have two offices separate offices so we'll
see the effects of this this is definitely gonna be interesting but
clinical research is built to work from home so many people can work them home
in clinical research so hopefully we see a lot more companies adopting that work
from home policy when I was an in-house CRA I had one day work from home when I
was a project management assistant I don't think I had any day's work from
home unfortunately I don't think I had a single day work from home at the time
but the policies have been changing policies have been changing guys so now
just probably way more work from home or there's going to be moving forward so as
far as back to normal who knows what the new normal is but what I mean is will
clinical trial do back to normal I mean patients come in on-site I mean
my monitors going on-site reviewing documents reviewing patient
files doctors on-site conduct
patient visits that's what I'm talking about I think we're a long ways away
from that I think we're a long ways away from that because I mean there's two
things that could happen they could reopen it decide it's too risky
close the back down again they could reopen it as the cases and deaths
increase and they just let people get wiped out because the economy has to go
on people are hurting people are struggling the economy has to go on so I
mean it's just unfortunate because I feel like not I feel like with better
leadership across the country this would have been handled way better with more
sound and stable leadership this would have been handled way better and it's
just really unfortunate because a lot of people are gonna die from this that
didn't have to die a lot of people are gonna die because of greed people wanted
to get the economy back normal and make more money it's just unfortunate a lot
of people are gonna die that didn't have to die because of this
so we'll see guys we'll see so we'll have another update next week and stay
safe wear your masks I'm very happy to say that I've been in a lot of grocery
stores a lot of stores people are wearing masks so that's good to see and
this is the south so once again people don't like being told what to do but
people are wearing masks they are doing their best to stay safe you know they're
doing their best so that's all we can do is do our best to stay safe and we'll
have another update next week guys if you have any questions concerns need any
resume review help need interview preparation email me elite clinical
group at gmail.com take care