I had been working on a new video, call it 'An ode to New York'. and then 2020 happened.
New York has nearly half of all the coronavirus infections here in the US.
1,200 people are currently in ICUs.
We're gonna run out of these massive emergency supply. the story of that video
The story of that video was around how living in New York had changed my life,
because it did in a lot of ways.
I don't live in New York anymore I moved to Costa Rica I've been living
here for the past few years; but my company, the startup I run still has an...
office in the city, I was in that office just one week before the first case appeared in the city.
And seeing how the situation evolved in this first two weeks,
seeing how both of these governments responded,
I wouldn't choose anywhere else in the world to be than Costa Rica.
Let me show you some numbers.
The first confirmed case in New York City was on March 1st.
March first the first confirmed case in Costa Rica was March 6th,
a woman who flew in from New York City and was not diagnosed because she had no symptoms.
Two days later after the first case was confirmed, the government was already
issuing orders for companies to begin working from home.
The border and all schools were closed before we had a hundred cases in the country,
and non-essential businesses soon after.
In New York schools were only closed after
the thousandth case was breached; non-essential businesses were closed
after they had 10,000 cases in the city.
Now, it's obviously necessary to note how
New York City is extremely more dense than Costa Rica, and this might not be a
fair comparison on the speed of the spread; however what I'm trying to point
out here is how quickly where measures implemented by the governments.
We don't have masks, we don't have ventilators, I was very blunt with the people of my
city yesterday, at the beginning of April we will run out of basic medical supplies
On hospital beds, New York has, approximately 23,000 beds,
which is 2.7 beds per thousand people.
That more than doubles Costa Rica's 1.1 beds per thousand people,
and perhaps that's why the Costa Rican government had to be extra careful.
With limited hospital beds,
and only 140 ICU units in the country, any steep curve would put us in a lot of trouble.
In New York City, as of April 10th,
there were 21,000 hospitalized on COVID-19, plus the people already in the hospital.
The system was overwhelmed and then they had to improvise.
This chart over here is probably the most important one of all,
Few countries, even success stories like South Korea,
have been as successful as Costa Rica in slowing the curve.
So the key here was obviously, how quickly the governor responded,
and how seriously they took the situation from the get-go. But if it has not been easy,
we've been in lockdown for around five weeks now, we are still allowed to come
outside, we actually were encouraged to exercise as long as we're alone,
but one of the reasons for that, is because we didn't have the legislation
to do curfews, it's not in our Constitution. The government had to
find workarounds to stop people from leaving their houses, at least in groups.
One of those was restricting car movement, forcing most...
...businesses to close; even at the supermarket only one person per family
can go in, and there's a restriction on how many products you can purchase.
It's helped us not run out of toilet paper.
Resident aliens were told that if they left the country, their visas would be revoked,
schools have been closed for a month.
So the measures have been very harsh,
but they're working.
So we're a country of five million people and with 140 ICU beds,
80% of them occupied before the coronavirus started... we were in a tough situation,
but the government really quickly reacted , and established/repurposed a whole hospital...
...to treat potential coronavirus patients. We just couldn't afford or be prepared
to build a new hospital in ten days, like China did; but I think it was a
pretty solid effort, and so far only a couple of those beds are in use.
Now, fellow Costa Ricans will find this pointless to mention, but all treatment
and all tests for coronavirus are free, they're covered by our Universal Healthcare,
which is a thing that Americans don't seem to be interested in.
Now, this was a huge, huge effort from a government that, myself included we all often
criticized as inefficient, but if things keep moving the way they've been moving,
we are gonna go down in the history books, as one of the most successful case
studies for managing the coronavirus crisis.
Now the challenge with all of this,
the biggest impact that we're gonna suffer is in the aftermath because we
are a country that lives off tourism.
We have 2.6 million visitors per year which
makes around five percent of our GDP.
Around 400,000 jobs depend directly or indirectly from tourism,
that's almost 10% of our total population and 18% of our workforce.
Most of their income has been completely stalled.
Now that, of course, extends to other businesses and other industries,
restaurants and retail have been affected pretty badly as well.
I'm a business owner, I kind of understand what these companies have to go through,
while Slidebean, the company I run has not been severely affected by this,
I understand, most businesses don't have the capacity to maintain their payroll,
ongoing, without any revenue for more than a few months or maybe less.
A lot of business owners are in a tough spot, and I don't blame them if they need to et employees go
It's terrible,
it's painful,
but business owners find themselves in the situation...
..where they need to do everything they can to salvage the business,
and hopefully, bring those jobs back again later.
Now our country has been struggling with a
budget deficit for the past few years, this government has had to implement new taxes,
to be able to counter that,
and even with that situation,
the government was able to come up with a +$3 billion dollar package
to be able to give these families at risk, at least some income over the next few months.
I think your funding around 400,000 families, with checks
of up to $200, which is of course not a lot,
but again, when a family depends completely, on an industry that's completely shut down.
being able to eat every month this as an issue.
The government is doing everything they can to treat that,
and Costa Rica is not a rich country: this fun, all the efforts that...
we'll need to make, all the money that we'll need to spend
over the next few weeks, are gonna have a massive impact
in the country and the months and years to come.
We have no idea when this pandemic will end,
we have no idea when the country will open up again,
and the best thing we have is this chart I just showed you,
which at least keeps our hopes high.
I think that after a couple of weeks of being in lockdown, you start accepting this as the new normal,
and hopefully, most people have begun to be productive again at their jobs,
if they still have them.
Finding a silver lining in all this, there's an
opportunity for other entrepreneurs:
the world has just come up with a thousand new problems,
and I think that there are ideas out there that are going
to tackle those problems specifically; so it's those entrepreneurs that will take
advantage of the situation, not only for themselves, but for the new jobs
the world so desperately needs to create to get out of this recession.
It's that creativity, it's the ability to work under this uncertainty and pressure,
it's the ability to adapt faster, that that makes up most successful entrepreneurs.
So I'm trusting and all of us/them to to get us out of this.
After we get through this if you're Costa Rican, please stick around the country and vacation here,
if you're from outside of Costa Rica please consider our country for vacations;
I'll personally take you for some Caribbean Chifrijo if you visit.
This is my personal YouTube channel where I treat a lot of random topics,
outside of the stuff that we do in the official Slidebean channel.
If you enjoy my content, hit that subscribe button and I'll see you next week.