Alex and I have been embroiled in the disaster field for over a decade now. Between volunteering, training, work, and education, we have dedicated a lot of time and effort to the subject of disaster preparedness.
We honestly thought we were prepared to deal with pretty much anything.
Both of us struggle with just how wrong we were. How wrong we all were in our frankly arrogant belief that something like the coronavirus outbreak could never happen here.
So now we are taking the opportunity to parse through our reactions and those of the country we live in, to determine what went wrong and where we can make it go right the next time around.
The Beginning: COVID-19 was not even a thought in my head when China confirmed the existence of an unknown health concern back at the end of December 2019. Still fresh from the Peace Corps in Paraguay, I was focused on trying to get my feet on the ground back in the US. Meanwhile, Alex was planning a southeast Asia trip that would later come to seem riskier than necessary.
Early Days: I heard about how rapidly things began devolving in China from friends and family, and I read about it on my news app, but I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been. Even when that first death occurred on January 11, I didn’t realize it had happened until days later.
In all honesty, I had never paid much attention to disease outbreaks within the disaster or emergency spheres, so my reaction wasn’t exactly unique or unprecedented. A myth had evolved in my mind—as I think it had in many people’s—that a real pandemic was a theoretical issue, not something our Western healthcare and public health systems would ever actually let happen.
I failed to question the idea of our healthcare system’s infallibility in the face of an outbreak, while at the same time I bemoaned its failures and shortfalls to deal with even the most basic of chronic disease and lifestyle concerns that we face on a day-to-day basis as a country. And I certainly was oblivious to the loss of investment in and attention to public health preparedness structures (at the federal level especially).
It was easier to think that way; I didn’t have to stress so much about what might happen if we did see an outbreak or if a new disease made itself known. So, I took too long to educate myself, especially for someone with a background in teaching people to prepare and respond early if they want to do so effectively.
Hindsight is 20/20 though, and no one can be prepared for everything. Still, I felt remiss as a trainer and educator, justified or not.
Processing Begins: When the US confirmed cases a week or so after that first death in China, all I could think about was the overreaction of the public during the Ebola outbreak a few years earlier. Alex, who was in Southeast Asia when coronavirus became a widely talked about concern in the US, had a train of thought that was unsurprisingly and yet upsettingly similar:
“I joked with experts and tourists about how overblown this all was, how much we thought this would be comparable to an influenza outbreak (of course, this was without a herd of intelligence, CDC, and NIH/NIAID experts trying desperately to brief me on the outbreak; I just had the occasional news exposure and public health notifications from Vietnamese authorities).
I professed insight into how challenging it was for American authorities to balance the need to restrict potential spread, and not overreact. I figured we’d see a few cases and it would play out like SARS or H1N1.
I was optimistic in the face of (substantially self-inflicted) minimal information. I naively thought the US would give its responders the tools to test, monitor, verify, and contact-trace appropriately. It seems my cynicism regarding the severity of such a disease and my vacation mindset overrode that preparedness mentality I thought I had honed.”
Obviously, COVID-19 was not Ebola, and I think we can all agree that under-reacting ended up being worse than overreacting ever could have been.
Reacting vs Responding: The World Health Organization (WHO) didn’t declare an international emergency until January 30, a full 10 days after cases had been confirmed in 4 countries outside of China, and a full week after the city of Wuhan was completely isolated by the Chinese government.
Even though Trump closed off China-US travel on the 31st, not that strange of a choice for our pro-travel ban president, it was the frighteningly rapid spread of the virus on the quarantined Princess Cruise ship in Japan that finally made me start paying attention.
Even then, all I did was buy some extra canned food at the grocery store and follow the news more actively. The problem felt so far away for me, as I’m sure it did for a lot of people around the world, and I felt powerless to do anything about it.
Outside of the AIDS epidemic, which was taboo enough while I was growing up that it seemed more like a boogeyman than a disease (especially to a queer kid), no outbreak had ever really captured my attention. We, the US as a whole, were complacent in the face of disease. Somehow, we had convinced ourselves that the CDC and our miracle drugs and our wealth could keep everything at bay, especially a disease that seemed a whole lot like the common flu to most folks.
Italy’s major outbreak was shocking in late February, and news of Iran’s emergence as another hotspot following closely on Italy’s heels gave the crisis a truly international sense that it had lacked for me up to that point.
Thankfully, it was a swift enough kick in the rear to finally get the US administration to quit wholly sitting on their hands, but it wasn’t quick enough. It took the death of the first US citizen for travel restrictions to be expanded from China-only, and even by March 3rd, the CDC still did not have an effective test for the virus.
Declarations Abound: Something that is often said in the disaster and emergency sphere is that “disasters are local.” We saw that in glaring detail when counties on the West Coast and across the country began declaring states of emergency and public health emergencies as early as the first week of February – no doubt encouraged by the public health emergency declared by the Secretary of Health and Human Services in late January.
In the meantime, it took the White House more than a month after that to recognize the severity of the problem and declare a national emergency to release more funds and resources to affected areas.
By the time California and Washington state began reacting to the coronavirus, so did I, and not in the most effective way. As a Floridian with a long history of preparing for hurricanes, my gut reaction to every disaster is to stock up like I won’t have power or water or access to a grocery store for at least a couple of weeks.
So, that’s exactly what I did, as well as trying to make as much money as I could as quickly as I could, knowing that I was not likely to be able to work once everything hit the fan.
Misinformation and Uncertainty: I was finally paying attention, shocked into action by the astonishingly rapid spread of cases across the country, and somehow freaking out and not overly concerned at the same time. Misinformation was flying, I struggled to follow the news, somehow understanding that things were extremely serious without truly knowing what to do about it. It was easier to believe the myth that young, healthy people weren’t at high risk.
Unlike some of my classmates at the time, I was not so blasé about the situation as to buy tickets for a corona-priced cruise during this global pandemic, but outside of stocking up I also wasn’t taking too many extra precautions.
It was not until schools began closing down in early March that I knew it was serious. I was tutoring at the time and learned that my student’s spring break was going to be extended by a week. That week turned into 2, and 2 turned into the school shutting down for the foreseeable future.
My own skills exam for my EMT-B course got moved up by almost 3 weeks, which was panic-inducing in and of itself, but also indicated to me the extremity of the threat we faced. I was to finish my course online, and my clinicals were postponed indefinitely. On top of that, I was making deliveries from fast food restaurants with closed dining rooms that required sealed bags and no-contact deliveries.
It was obviously time to stop being complacent, I didn’t have the option to help out in a medical capacity because I couldn’t finish my license, and my disaster experience fell short when it came to public health emergencies. So, even though I was trained in a way that meant I was supposed to be useful in exactly this kind of scenario, the reality was that I had absolutely no clue what to do next, and it was incredibly unsettling.
