H1N1 (State)

The news today included a lot of information about H1N1 continuing to spread, but I am going to continue my critique of the initial response. Even if the spread continues, in the US we have settled down from the initial emergency response and are getting geared up for a longer term response, making this a good time to look at how things went.

The main thing I wanted to say about states also relates to HHS and CDC. Specifically, a hope that states that received and at least partially distributed SNS assets (which is the majority at this point) are granted an exception from the grant requirements that they run a pandemic-related exercise. Instead, they should be required to complete the same analysis and corrective action development program that is normally followed after an exercise to study and improve their performance in receiving and distributing the assets. After all, which is better – an exercise where everyone tries to act like its real, or an actual event?

Trust me on this, my day job is organizing and analyzing state and Federal emergency response exercises, no matter how hard you try the simple fact is there are too many artificialities in exercises for them to really feel like the real thing.

We have a majority of states that have had to implement at least segments of their public health emergency operations plans (EOPs) and either their pandemic- or SNS-specific plans. As I mentioned in my last post, this gives us a potentially unique opportunity to evaluate some of these pandemic plans based on an actual activation, but one that was brief enough that the resources weren’t stressed to the breaking point. Instead, the plans and departments were tested enough to find the holes, and now we have a chance to plug them.

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