It’s a sunny and warm weekday afternoon, but you wouldn’t know it from the emergency management room in the basement of the state Capitol. Large screens and stapled information packets display the number of infected Utahns, casualties, and how those numbers are projected to grow. Healthcare professionals talk about the mechanics of the virus and how to prevent spread. State and local leaders are there along with education officials, the heads of business and hospitals, religious leaders, and even directors of major utilities and transportation infrastructure.
They discuss hospital overcrowding and schools closing. They consider shutting down all public spaces. They talk about dwindling supplies, grocery shortages, and even a few incidents of civil unrest. They try to predict how many people will die and how long it will take the state to recover.
It’s a grim and frightening scenario. But at this moment, it’s just that—a scenario.
It’s only 2007. There is no global pandemic, rather, Envision Utah has gathered leaders from around the state to participate in a pandemic response exercise.
Fast forward 13 years and, unfortunately, this scenario feels a little more real. COVID-19 has reached pandemic status and the number of infected Utahns grows every day. Thankfully, we haven’t seen any casualties in the state yet. Grocery shelves are increasingly bare and many public spaces are closed, but there are no reports of civil unrest.
That 2007 exercise wasn’t a perfect preview of what we’re experiencing today, but there are still a few critical takeaways.
1. You can never have a perfect scenario, but it’s worth it to try.
Our 2007 scenario was based on a human-to-human adaptation of the H5N1 influenza virus. It’s very different than the coronavirus that we’re facing today. H5N1 Symptoms are much more immediate and severe. It also carries a much higher mortality rate. In many ways, preparing for and responding to the coronavirus is a different challenge than preparing for and responding to H5N1.
But even an imperfect scenario can yield important lessons. The men and women gathered in that room confronted challenges they may not have confronted before. Questions like these:
How long can you produce, transmit and distribute your major product or service if large numbers of staff are not at work?
Can key staff members telecommute or otherwise work out of their homes?
Today we might add whether your staff have secure, reliable ways to work from home?
Have significant numbers of staff been cross-trained so they can readily perform more than one job?
2. You can never be 100% prepared.
Even the most prepared participants in 2007 were caught off guard by some of the questions:
Are you prepared to have key essential staff come to work and stay at work for several weeks?
What if you provide essential infrastructure services (like healthcare, utilities, etc.) and can’t afford to have key staff risk exposure outside your office?
Does your company’s disaster plan adequately address staff family members’ needs during an emergency?
People won’t come to work if they’re families aren’t taken care of. Do you allow for that? Or do you have ways to support that?
Even though they were caught off guard, the stronger their emergency response plans, the more able they were to figure out how to adapt to these novel challenges.
3. It takes a community.
One of the most important things we wanted to understand in 2007 was just how much organizations relied on one another:
Do the production, transmission and distribution systems of other companies affect your ability to stay operational? In what way?
Is your headquarters facility able to function effectively if municipal water, electricity, natural gas, and sewage systems become inoperative?
Not only do many organizations rely on each other to do their job (e.g., power companies rely on water for cooling, water treatment plants rely on electricity to run, many businesses rely on shipping, etc.), but we also rely on each other to overcome a pandemic. Individuals take responsibility to avoid spreading disease. Public officials need good information to make good decisions.
Most importantly, we can’t prepare for a pandemic or any other challenge if we’re not willing to come together and take a hard look at our future.
13 years is probably too long between emergency-preparedness exercises like this—and we wish COVID-19 were just an exercise, not a real pandemic. But we still believe our essential services and infrastructure are better for their willingness to think about what could happen in the future.
Our first priority today remains to get through this pandemic as best as we can. This means vigilant social distancing, washing hands often, maintaining good communication, and helping each other in any ways we can. The more proactive and extreme we can be in the measures we take, the better off we will be in the long run.
We hope we can get through this pandemic soon and that we can recover quickly, although we also know it may be a while before we’re back to normal. We also know this won’t be the last major challenge Utah faces. But Envision Utah is built on the principle that when we come together and look to the future, we can make smart decisions that will leave Utah a better place despite our challenges.