We are failing to plan for overlapping disasters -and they are already here
Image: @kellysikkema
By Charley Willison and Iris Holmes
Disaster season has arrived in the United States. For many, this means an increased risk of hurricanes, wildfires and floods in a period where communities are already dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Policies and models concerning COVID-19 that operate on the assumption that preparedness and response will occur under typical circumstances and not concurrent with other disasters may create perverse incentives to only plan and prepare for one disaster at a time.
Currently, no state COVID-19 plans, policies, or national epidemiologic COVID-19 models, account for the risk of concurrent disasters in planning for or measuring and predicting SARS-CoV-2 spread.
We discuss this oversight in our recent article in Milbank Quarterly, entitled Isolated Coronavirus Policies and Models Create Perverse Incentives for Disaster Preparedness:
“planning and preparing for a single disaster is a problem because populations often experience mass migration in response to disasters, and planned disaster responses typically incorporate congregate shelter. Both long-distance migration and clustering in temporary shelters undermine social distancing as a mitigation strategy.”
Furthermore, governance strategies that do not account for this concurrent risk will likely exacerbate racial disparities.
Racial or ethnic minority groups are at highest risk of adverse health outcomes from COVID-19 and natural disasters; the U.S cannot promote siloed emergency planning and preparedness across different public health emergencies without further exacerbating health disparities.
Governance encompasses both the processes by which policies are designed and delivered (including intended policy goals) and whether or not policies work successfully to address those policy problems.
Fragmentation across policy areas can be problematic when policy success is predicated on coordination. COVID-19 policies are now experiencing such challenges, where policies and data to inform those policies were predicated on assumptions that may not align with the long-duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To minimize the potential harms from overlapping disasters, we urge policymakers to establish disaster plans that explicitly incorporate the context of our current global pandemic.
