No One Saw This Coming

Last winter, the news began to offer up snippets of information about a mysterious new viral illness in Wuhan, China, stirring unsettling memories of time I spent in the education classroom at Charles Cole Memorial Hospital as a member of a Pandemic Response Preparedness Team.

Since I have been retired for more than ten years, this must have been during the years George W. Bush was president. Around the table were representatives of most hospital departments - infection control, utilization review, purchasing, ancillary services, housekeeping, maintenance, dietary, nursing, medical staff, practice management, education and me, representing the public relations department. Meetings took place regularly over a couple of months and included the people who worked on Potter County's Emergency Management team. There was guidance and informations from state and national agencies.

The scenarios we rehearsed in our tabletop drill were eerily similar to the pandemic we are staring down today. It was one person coming into the country carrying a new infection - one that had never before been observed - one that had no vaccine - one that behaved in ways different than other varieties of influenza.

At the end of the exercise there was a plan. There was a plan to address how the local response would be mounted, detailing roles of the Center For Disease Control and the State Health Department and everyone would implement the phases of the plan

Those hours, all those years ago, spent imagining what might happen should a pandemic strike brought me a measure of comfort in early days as Coronavirus and Covid-19 became household words.  As a country, we know how to do this, I thought.

"It's going to just magically go away," the President of the United States said. "It's a hoax," he said.

We were in Washington, spending a couple of months with our grandchildren. It was late February when a "person of interest" who had ties to the local school was being tested for suspected coronavirus. The school was closed for three days while it was deep cleaned and while awaiting test results that later came back negative.

This is real, I thought.

The death count across the world began to rise. The number of confirmed cases began to rise.  It's "an unforeseen problem" that "came out of nowhere" the President of the United States said. "We're having to fix a problem that, four weeks ago, nobody ever thought would be a problem," he said. "It's something that nobody expected," he said. 

But lots of somebodies saw this coming.

There was another person at the pandemic planning table  - a funeral director. And visions of refrigerated trucks outside my hospital office, much like those lined up today outside New York City hospitals, troubled my dreams.

If you choose to learn more about our nation's pandemic preparedness, here is a well-researched link. The work of Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with more than 30 years of experience also offers facts about global threat from emerging infectious disease.

Update, December 23, 2020: From Heather Cox Richardson, "The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis that is investigating the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic today released documents showing that Trump appointees in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tried to “alter or block” at least 13 of the reports written by CDC scientists. Appointees messed around with the CDC’s traditional “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports” and edited reports on the use of masks, the dangers of Covid-19 in children, and the spread of the disease. They also tried to delete emails revealing political interference in scientific assessments. Some of the emails from science adviser Paul Alexander calling for the administration to speed the spread of coronavirus in order to achieve herd immunity have sparked outrage."