‘We’ve all been planning for it’: Local EMA pandemic response has been in place for years

Published 5:15 am Saturday, March 14, 2020

Managing a public health threat like the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak isn’t just a job for officials at the national and state levels — it’s also a task that involves the close attention of local emergency response workers.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s declaration of a nationwide state of emergency Friday, local Emergency Management Agency director Phyllis Little said she and other responders are already communicating about how to enact the pandemic response plan they’ve had in place for years — though seldom need to activate.

“There are FEMA-mandated health care coalitions across the country, and we have eight or nine in the State of Alabama,” she said. “These coalitions have been in place for the past five years, and this is the very thing that we’ve all been planning for. It engages hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, dialysis centers, first responders, and other critical needs services.”

For the time being, EMA’s immediate priority is to work with other agencies to assure that everything they do on a daily basis, even in times of normal operation, continues undisrupted in the face of an emergent pandemic. “Nothing stops; this is just added on top of it,” she said.

“Water, sanitation, 911, EMS, fire, law enforcement — those are things that you cannot just stop. You can’t do without them, and they’ve all got to continue to do their jobs, even with these additional factors added in. We’re already entering spring severe weather season, and in theory, we’ve planned ahead. As we continue receiving information from federal and state sources, we will continue to re-examine things and see what’s still feasible and where there might be a creative or better way to smoothly continue services.”

Getting information from official sources, and taking the ocean of commentary on social media (and on television) with a grain of salt, also can help stem the psychologically-driven behaviors that exacerbate an emergency, Little added.

“With both social media and even the news media, sometimes it feels that people have nothing else to do to keep them busy other than to comment and post stuff. Honestly, it sometimes makes me question what’s happened to common sense. The best thing I can tell people is to take the same kind of precautions they would with the flu. And definitely refer to the Centers for Disease Control’s coronavirus web page, which is updated daily, as well as the Alabama Department of Public Health’s page on coronavirus.”

The CDC’s page can be found at https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html.

The Alabama Department of Public Health’s page can be found at http://www.alabamapublichealth.gov/infectiousdiseases/2019-coronavirus.html.