COVID’s Biggest Surprises—Published May 20, 2022
by Eric Holdeman
I’ve been planning for wars and disasters for over 50 years. With warfare you can expect surprises. While you control your own actions, you can’t control your enemy’s. With natural disasters you can anticipate the impacts for what might happen, but you never know the full extent of potential damages and problems you will face. In both of the above cases—there are surprises. The COVID Pandemic has given us surprise after surprise after surprise.
To begin with there is the length of the pandemic and how, still today, it continues to persist, change and continue to cause trouble on a whole host of fronts. I’ve personally participated in several pandemic after action reviews and across the board the challenges created by the pandemic were at times all consuming.
The characterization of the disease was something that confounded medical professionals and scientists early in the pandemic. Where did it come from? How was it being passed from person to person? What were the appropriate preventive measures to be taken to protect yourself and your family? Does anyone remember putting groceries on the front porch to be “decontaminated by the sun?”
If there is one public health mantra that was known and understood before the pandemic, it was that public messaging on the disease had to be consistent by all organizations, governments and leaders. No one anticipated the extent that that basic and well known communications concept would be violated, again and again. Still today the wearing of or not wearing of masks might be more of a political statement than a medical decision.
Prior pandemic planning had anticipated a need for a national stockpile of medical supplies. It did exist and it was totally inadequate for the national need that developed. What prior planning did not anticipate was the need for widespread testing of individuals that would go beyond the doctor’s office. While a solution to a new virus was vaccine development, no one had planned for mass vaccination sites since it was presumed to take 4-6 years to develop and produce a new vaccine. The need for mass vaccination sites was a happy surprise.
Business continuity planning done by governments and businesses never anticipated that the percentage of the workforce that was sent home—could, when equipped with the right tools, continue to work and be productive. It is requiring an entirely new definition for who is an essential worker while defining what it means to be “at work.”
Think of all the social impacts that have come about because of the pandemic. Ask any elementary school teacher about the status of learning in their classes and how children returning to the classroom have, in the course of only months lost many of their social skills and ability to interact with one another in a socially appropriate manner. The mental health of children experiencing the pandemic and then returning to the classroom has been a surprise.
Companies have gone out of business. Brick and mortar retailers have suffered huge losses, while on-line shopping surged and Internet based companies prospered mightily. And then, there were surprising shortages, toilet paper—really? Supply chain disruptions made used cars more valuable—another surprise, when does that ever happen? The fact that there are shortages that continue until today is unbelievable.
While the medical response was planned for in the past, the economic impacts and government response to those impacts has been improvisational at best. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that the United States would have over one million deaths from a pandemic—given all our medical capabilities. Surprise! We collectively were not ready. No surprise there!
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Eric Holdeman, is a nationally known emergency manager and blogger. He has worked at the federal, state and local levels. Today he is the Director, Center for Regional Disaster Resilience (CRDR).
