By Dottie Barnes
GVSU

For more than a decade, Davia Downey, associate professor of public, nonprofit and health administration, has focused her research on American disaster response.

Downey said responding to public health disasters, like COVID-19, is particularly difficult.

“All communities have hazard response plans for earthquakes, hurricanes, public health events and even terrorist attacks,” said Downey. “In most of these cases there is some warning or chatter before the disaster. That’s not the case with an infectious disease.”

While states and localities across the country have disaster management plans, Downey said most don’t pay attention to those plans until a disaster happens. “Too often, our best thinking happens after the disaster,” she said.

 

Assessing the response to COVID-19, Downey said two pieces are working well at the state level. First, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is consulting with statisticians, business owners, public health officials and emergency planners, while utilizing an internal metric system unique to Michigan.

Second, Downey said Michigan is looking to external partners about the sharing of resources. One way to facilitate this is through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact. All 50 states are part of EMAC in order to share knowledge, coordinate deployment of critical supplies and help each other take care of critical needs that arise.

There is also a lot of information that can be gained by looking back at the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, Downey said. That is the last time a global shutdown occurred because of a severely infectious disease that impacted multitudes of countries all at once.

“The one thing that is really beneficial is now we have the Internet. We have the ability to share information much more quickly,” she said. “I have been impressed with the amount of knowledge that is being shared openly and across state and country borders.”

Downey said there are already a few lessons that can be learned from COVID-19: emergency management needs to be global and not siloed, strong networks in the beginning are the most effective tool and regional strategies work best.

“The best way to recover from this type of disaster is to have strong collaboration networks. The places that will be left out of recovery will be directly related to the amount of collaboration those communities, states or countries were engaged in prior to and during this evolving disaster,” she said.

Downey noted there’s a human element to how people deal with the unknown which colors the way they think about how to respond to a disaster.

“That comes from our amount of discounting. If we haven’t come down with COVID-19, we have a tendency to discount the severity of what’s happening,” she explained. “Our tendency to discount things not at our front door is problematic in a disaster because it hinders our ability to think clearly about how to proceed.”