Communities and Pandemics

The following is offered by Dr. John Plodinec, Associate Director for Community Resilience Certification at CARRI.

Over the past few weeks, a CARRI team has been examining the impacts of pandemics on communities, and how to reduce them. The objective has been to identify actions communities should take before they are crippled by a pandemic to reduce impacts or speed recovery. While there is a tremendous amount of guidance available for specific sectors of a community (e.g., health care); there is very little aimed at the community as a whole.

The high rate of infection associated with a pandemic makes loss of human resources the most important direct impact. This results in a wide variety of indirect impacts – deaths, absenteeism, increased stress on those still working, a generally fearful population, and a variety of cascading effects. Both official and personal constraints on travel may limit the spread of disease but may exacerbate economic impacts.

In keeping with CARRI’s overarching goal to be relevant to any community, the impacts on different kinds of communities (large / small, urban / rural) were considered. While the effort is not yet complete, some interesting policy questions are being raised.

• Who should be immunized first, if the supply of vaccines is limited? While health care workers clearly should be among the first, it appears that there are both moral and practical reasons to also include some of those providing essential services, such as maintaining a community’s water and energy systems or guarding its prisons.
• Should special assistance be available for farmers? If a pandemic hits during either planting or harvest seasons, farmers could lose an entire crop. The resulting cascading impacts through a rural community would be devastating.
• Should private contractors responsible for providing essential community services (e.g., solid waste collection and disposal) be contractually required to have approved plans to continue operations in the face of a pandemic? Without such a requirement, a private contractor might be willing to pay a penalty for not providing service during a pandemic rather than try to maintain operations.
• What special actions should be taken to limit the impacts of a pandemic on prisons? Our nation's prisons are overcrowded, making them ideal candidates for contagion. The lack of trust between inmates and prison staff could easily slip into chaos if either the inmates panicked, or reduced staff led to loss of control.

The group expects to complete its effort next month.