The idea of being prepared for a disaster interests me. I always read those rare stories about California’s earthquake stockpiles and so on.
OK, so once we get though this mess, what ought we to do to be more ready next time? How much money should we spend? What would be the lowest-cost, biggest benefit things we should keep in warehouses?
I would think some sort of national stockpile of masks and gowns, with old stock swapped out for new stuff to keep within the expiration dates. Other disposable stuff, like swabs and who knows what else need to be ready. More than three FEMA hospitals would certainly be required.
The main thing might be laws that allow the use of not-quite-ready medical students, emergency ersatz ventilators, hospital rooms and treatments.
How much money do we we want to spend to be how much more ready than we were?
Well, first thing we all need to do is: BUY TOILET PAPER!
Seriously, every single body needs to think about disaster preparation. Obviously, if you are on welfare, or barely squeaking by, paycheck to paycheck, this will be difficult. But people really do need to start thinking, what if…
In California, of course, folks sock stuff away for The Big One. Parts of California need to consider wildfires.
If you’ve stockpiled TP in a wildfire-prone area, you’re just going to literally feed the flames!
Hurricane areas and flood-prone places won’t do too well with hoarding, I mean, stockpiling. All those buckets of rice in the basement won’t be worth much when you return home.
Foresight, lots of research, investing time and some money…
But knowing people, once COVID disappears from their rear view mirrors, it will be back to the usual.
Except for those of us who have been triggered to hoard. Do you have any five gallon buckets you don’t need?
~VOW
Is there anything we can do so that society doesn’t need to go on lockdown to deal with the virus? Would PPE (N95 masks, disposable gloves, etc) for the masses help keep the virus under control, or do the public in general, including myself, not have the experience to use PPE properly to prevent the virus from spreading?
In public gathers are there any kinds of air purifiers that will trap the virus? Would HEPA air filtration units, or ozone generators help reduce the level of viruses in public places so that people could congregate indoors without worrying as much about airborne viral transmission?
Also what about antimicrobial fomites? Certain commonly touched things like doorknobs are designed to be antimicrobial, and I think there are certain coatings you can put on existing ones to make them resistant to being a vector for pathogens.
In Michael Osterholm’s book Deadliest enemy, he devotes the final chapter to a variety of plans we could implement to be prepared for the next pandemic.
Which “we” do you mean? Individual citizens? The government (at whatever level)? The medical sector? Other parts of the private sector?
Who is stockpiling supplies in your OP? I’m assuming you mean the federal government but it’s not clear.
I think preparedness has less to do with buying a bunch of shit and more to do to listening to experts.
There’s no way we can buy enough stuff to keep on hand in case of pandemic, chemical weapons attack, 9.9 earthquakes, nuclear war, comets, and all the other calamities that might strike.
We can, however, learn to listen to experts warning of danger as it approaches so we use the time afforded to us to make better decisions on how to react and cope.
By “We” I mean society. How we do that, through government, industry, at the individual or federal level is open to discussion.
It occurs to me we have not had any problems with food, fuel or public utilities. We are good with those things.
I would think using masks would be first line.
In terms of long term, we need to be thinking, of first not outsourcing vital things so much and also when we build factories, building them with the idea of repurposing them easier.
And finally, the next time a new virus or bacteria appears, we need to begin to immediately develop a fast test for the virus and antibodies. This development should begin within 24 hours
While I realize for some germs, it may never be possible to develop a test so quickly, if we could test for antibodies and the virus itself, this quarantine would take on a vastly different tone.
Just think right now over 75K people in NYC have the coronavirus, in two or three weeks, most of them will be immune and not have to worry, like the rest of us. In terms of money and recovery, this will give NY a huge leap over the rest of the country, however sad the price was.
Well, depends on who you mean by ‘we’ I guess. As a society, I think the funding levels for the CDC need to be seriously ramped up, with an eye towards quicker response in the future, especially wrt rapid prototyping and manufacturing of test kits. That was the biggest failure on that score, IMHO. The government also needs to do more training and disaster planning, especially at the highest levels, but really at all levels. Our own local government (state and county) REALLY needs to do the training so they understand the implications and ramifications and can respond in a more coherent manner. The trouble is, at all levels, government officials and administration tend to blow off the training and not show up, and just put it at a low priority. And that has hurt us across the board at all levels. It’s hurt us ESPECIALLY at the top level, so we need to really consider who we select as President and to represent us in Congress, as well as Governor…it can have a very direct impact for when (not if) something like this happens again.
Myself, we had a COOP plan for our department…but almost no one else even considered this, even as much as 3-4 weeks ago, despite multiple departments talking about it and stressing we needed to at least think about what we’d do. I think that, again, is something that needs to be done.
Really, it’s not necessarily how much money you throw at this, it’s how much you prepare, especially mentally, for what could happen and what you can do. If people and organizations would have been prepared, even if just mentally, had thought through their responses and what they could and would do, we’d have been in a better place. So…more funding for the CDC, especially in things like rapid prototyping for test kits and mass manufacturing systems lined up, plus more funding for rapid response to hot spots, plus funding for the national stockpile and planning I think is what we need to do before the next one of these hit. And we better get fucking on it soon, because the next one might be hitting us right at the end of our own curve in the next 4 weeks, because of the bounce back effect. Or it might hit us in the fall, when this thing bounces to places that are currently in summer and those people come back to the US or Europe. Or it might bounce back because in Asia some countries like China have relaxed their social distancing rules in an effort to get folks working again so their economies don’t collapse, and it might also be worse there than we are being told. Regardless, we need to get moving on this. IMHO and all that.
What this current pandemic has shown is that any and all preparation is useless if government leaders are determined to ignore it.
If - in the midst of this crisis - people are not being tested because the leadership wants to keep the official statistics low, then what’s the point of improving testing for the future?
What’s the point of restoring the global health security office in the National Security Council if all it takes is another shortsighted leader to close it again?
Learning from this experience starts with addressing, in some way, the ongoing failure of leadership.
The most important low hanging fruit isn’t stockpiling equipment or pouring money into research or trying to make all public surfaces antimicrobial, but establishing a global surveillance system for tracking the incidence of infectious disease and communicating real data and trend analysis to epidemiologists around the world without regard to political considerations so that national leaders can be made aware of potential threats with enough lead time to do something effective about it. Obviously, it follows that leaders need to be educated on the hazard that epidemics pose, not only to health but to the economy so that there isn’t this false dichotomy between taking effective measures to slow (if not stop) the spread versus “getting everyone back to work”, as if the damage wrought by millions of deaths and threat of further contagion isn’t going to have severe economic impacts. And following that, there need to be plans in place going from the national to regional to local level so officials at those levels aren’t left flailing and trying to figure out how to do control and containment based upon their own wholly inadequate knowledge and lack of ability to control anything outside of their region or municipality.
None of this requires warehouses of medical equipment and protective gear, or trillions of dollars of research or remaking our architecture to be less prone to housing and spreading pathogens (although all of those are worthwhile in their own way). It does require the political will to let epidemiologists do their jobs, and to listen to the warnings that the epidemiological community has been offering for decades regarding the threat of global pandemic. Pathogens don’t give a good whore’s fuck about your ideology, or racist belief system, or national border, and putting politics over good public health policy has unnecessarily cost millions or perhaps tens of millions of lives. Every politician who waffled about taking effective measures long after the hazard posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus was evident from the COVID-19 outbreaks in Iran and Italy needs to be held accountable for the criminal negligence and willful indifference to suffering and death that is a result of their actions.
Also, Steven Soderbergh needs to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Contagion needs to be mandatory viewing in high school health classes. If more people would have paid attention to that film rather than watching rom-coms and Transformer crapfests, maybe the public would have understood the significance of the threat instead of going on spring break and partying their guts out while health officials watched their warnings being completely ignored.
Stranger
They should make your post a sticky on this. Good post.
Or to put it in words they understand. Better to spend billions now, then trillions later on.
That’s true as far as it goes, but there is also the simple fact that we cannot stop pathogenic disease (at least, with any conventional technology), and we probably can’t prevent epidemic outbreaks of endogenous diseases like influenza, but we can take effective measures to eliminate likely zoonotic transfer sites such as the Chinese ‘wet markets’, we can surveil health systems to identify the beginning of an epidemic and impose effective containment and quarantine while assuring people that they won’t lose their jobs or be made homeless and destitute while not working, and we can put resources where they are most needed in a timely fashion to forestall a far worse pandemic.
Whether we can convince people to voluntarily take measures to reduce contagion is still in question (though this epidemic is going to be in the minds of the this generation at least) and we need to ensure that people are well educated on the topic of public health; not just viral epidemics abut the necessity of reducing poverty and ignorance so that immunization campaigns have a chance at actually stomping out viral pathogens like Measles morbillivirus and Poliovirus. As long as there are anti-vaxers and religious fundamentalists who oppose evidence-based medical intervention and prevention we just aren’t going to be able to stomp out those threats. And as long as there are people crowded in slums with no access to clean water, basic sanitation, good nutrition, and basic medical care, we’ll experience bacterial and parasitical epidemics regardless of viral immunization campaigns.
Taking even 1% of the gross world product and sowing it into raising the basic health and education of the roughly one billion people living in extreme poverty would reap such benefits as to vastly outweigh the costs. We won’t, of course, because “Socialism!” and nationalist identify politics even though this benefits exactly no one except autocrats who want a group of people they can point to as their poverty being a morally iniquitous threat and reason to prevent immigration, but there you go. The real enemy isn’t pathogenic organisms; it is our own collective and often deliberate ignorance.
Stranger
Agreed. What do you think of the recent push in China for TCM as an official thing? It seems…reckless. That’s the sort of thing that is really scary, not that we in the west are immune from stuff, as you mentioned with the anti-vax movement. At this point, I think that serious consideration should be made to officially shut that sort of thing down. I get that it’s a balancing act between the rights to think stupid things and public health, but I think in this case public health needs to be given a bit more weight on this score. Or, at least a concerted effort to educate both the public and the government and private business, especially those decision makers.
In the end, what we can do is plan. We can’t completely eliminate the chance of another infection. It WILL happen again. And, sadly, we’ve been told this for decades that it was only a matter of time, yet few actually paid attention. What we can do is try and mitigate the next one to the extent possible. Have the systems and processes in place, have the policies in the pipeline, train people and educate people. Have the ability to detect outbreaks and respond quickly, have the ability to create test kits, test them and the ability to rapidly be able to manufacture and distribute them as a process ready to put in effect if needed. And, as already noted, educate the public, the government and private industry.
And make those damn administrative people actually go to the damned training and take it seriously. That’s been one of my own, personal frustrations. The last 2 months have been trying to get people to pay attention…until the crisis hit, then it was panic and trying to help departments and agencies shift to remote operations because they had no COOP and hadn’t given any of this any serious thought. :smack:
Have an intelligent, honest, selfless President.
Elect people who we would trust to tell us that we’re completely wrong, without ever asking what they believe, rather than electing people who agree with us.
I am not at the moment interested in the political side of this discussion.
Years ago I was told that in an emergency the most important thing you can have are friends. All in all, we need to strengthen our families and sense of community. When all of this is over we will hear stores of bodies found in empty apartments unnoticed. With a strong social network comes a lot of good stuff. Now how to specifically to do this I do not know.
One can argue that TCM is partially responsible for the mess we’re in now. I think it should be illegal, even here in China, to label that nonsense as medicine.
If you can test, you can trace and quarantine. We could not test because for a critically long time the CDC did not approve extant tests, and wanted to develop their own. After that, they fucked up some more. You cannot control an outbreak without tests, so we need to change the approval process for testing of emerging outbreaks at the CDC. The fact that nearly 3 months after the first sequencing of the virus was available, there still aren’t enough tests in the US to test *even those with symptoms *is unfathomable.
What the fuck is “TCM”? Is Ted Turner behind this epidemic? Is this his attempt to one-up on his plague of colorizing classic films?
Stranger