This week’s list is a bit long because I missed last week! Too many deadlines, not enough time. This was a lot to catch up on.
The New York Times: An Incalculable Loss
It’s difficult to comprehend the number of deaths from COVID in the United States but the New York Times did an excellent job trying as the official death toll crosses 100,000.
Vox: The US tested the wrong people for coronavirus
Good explanation of why it’s not just the number of tests you’re doing but who you’re testing that matters.
Rolling Stone: The four men responsible for America’s COVID-19 test disaster
Something that people seem to have a hard time understanding is that you can often name a handful of people who are pretty directly responsible for causing a disaster. Yet another reason that terms like “natural disaster” are so dangerous. They obscure the cause, which obscures the parties responsible and prevent us from mitigating our risk in the future.
Vox: Experts’ 7 best ideas on how to beat COVID-19 and save the economy
I think it’s important to remember that it’s not that we don’t know what to do to respond to the pandemic, it’s that we’re not doing them.
The New York Times: How Pandemics End
A reminder that disasters are socially constructed.
The Week: Coronavirus will win. America needs to make a plan for failure.
An incomplete list of actions that still need to be taken to respond to the pandemic.
NPR: COVID-19 has created a legal crisis. FEMA’s usual response is missing.
Another example of how the existing emergency management infrastructure is going unused.
This is a really great look at how one community is using existing strategies of community care to manage their response to the pandemic.
Vox: How chaos theory helps explain the weirdness of the COVID-19 pandemic
This is what I mean when I say emergency managers need to be comfortable with uncertainty.
This is the first article I’ve seen that has tried to get specific about possible changes to mass evacuation timing.
Politico: ‘Hard stop’: states could lose national guard virus workers
This article looks at the possibility of an order from the Trump administration to end National Guard deployments while their help is still needed and one day before they would receive benefits.
SSRC: Pandemic & Disaster: Insights from Seventy Years of Social Science Disaster Research
A must-read piece from Dr. Kathleen Tierney on how seventy years of disaster research can inform our response to the pandemic.
Roll Call: Coronavirus wallops disaster agencies as storms, fires approach
Continued coverage on the impact the pandemic has on our national emergency management capacity.
E&E News: FEMA seeks to limit evacuations, countering past advice
Last week FEMA released a COVID-19 Pandemic Operational Guide for the 2020 Hurricane Season. This article considers the evacuation recommendations from that guide. TLDR: prioritize staying with friends and family and avoid shadow evacuations.
Two major events of note occurred this week including Cyclone Amphan in India and Bangladesh and flooding in Michigan.