EAMON Gallagher was born in Termon. He went to St Eunan’s College in Letterkenny and then obtained an Electronics Engineering degree from what is now called the University of Limerick. He’s been in California over 30 years and currently lives in San Diego.
After starting and running a number of businesses he is now Vice President of Speaker Strategy for a CEO Executive Coaching company called Vistage. A key component of its business model involved CEOs and business leaders meeting in-person once a month in group of 12 – 20 people. “We’ve had to shift this model to virtual over the past two weeks. An interesting consequence of the current crisis that we’d been trying to incorporate virtual components into our model but it was met with some resistance to change and general apathy. In the past two weeks we have completely transformed our model to virtual! Nothing like a crisis to drive change,” he said.
According to Eamon the week of March 9th was probably the pivotal week where things began to really shift in San Diago.
“The week started pretty normal and by Friday of that week there was real concern and a feeling that this is becoming real and could really impact us. As of now most retail businesses are closed with restaurants doing curbside pickup or delivery. Many people are ordering food from local businesses in order to help them through this period. The toilet paper craze is alive and well here too,” he laughed.
All elective surgeries have been postponed in hospitals while doctors are doing virtual appointment whenever possible.
“The big concern is the potential to overwhelm the hospital infrastructure – beds, ventilators etc. People reference Italy as in ‘we don’t want to end up like Italy’ to encourage lockdowns, social distancing and the like,” he said.
Eamon and his family live close to the beach and last weekend there was a lot of people on the beach which prompted calls to close the beaches. Similar calls were made a lot closer to home last week too.
“Initially the potential threat was mostly downplayed by political leaders but now there is a more consistent message that we have to do certain things, such as ‘shelter in place’ in order to manage the threat.
“It looks like people back home are going through the same phase that we are. With the expected increase in testing there is the hope/expectation that it will allow an easing of the ‘lockdowns’ and allow businesses to reopen gradually.
“Political leaders here are already talking about getting back to business here because they know that an extended period of business closure will have a devastating effect on the economy,” he added.
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