Planning for a Pandemic
Photo by Cheng Feng from Unsplash
In a matter of a week our lives have turned completely upside down. Parents are working from home as offices are closed. Students are home-schooled as schools were mandated to close. Small businesses deemed non-essential are forced to close by state governments. Bars, lounges and clubs are indefinitely banned and while most restaurants are closed, some are only open to delivery orders. By mid-March, the U.S unemployment rate has skyrocketed, with nearly 3.5 million Americans without jobs. Governments all over the world have closed borders. Most cities throughout the world conducted a deep cleaning campaign, disinfecting public places and transit systems, while media campaigns promote #socialdistance #stayathome and #washyourhands. What appears to be a storyline from the movie Contagion, or Hulu’s A Handmaid’s Tale, AMC’s the Walking Dead, or even the Resident Evil trilogy, has become a stark reality for billions of people on the planet experiencing a lock-down amid a pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus.
COVID-19, also known as coronavirus, originated from a wet-market in Wuhan, China. The virus is one of many that were caused by animal to human contamination, due to unsanitary practices. Scientists claim the virus is a highly contagious and deadly “novel” or new corona-virus strand with an average lethality of 3.5%. Some countries, like Spain and Italy, are experiencing a more severe fatality rate of 4%. Meanwhile, the average flu kills on average 0.1% of the people it infects. Lead virologists, epidemiologists and immunologists such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and contributed to a wide range of research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, helped develop a set of national guidelines that would help mitigate the spread of the coronavirus in the United States. According to experts, the virus spreads through contaminated cough and sneeze water droplets. Symptoms vary from mild to severe “flu-like” symptoms, and may include chest pains, fever and pneumonia. It is determined that people with compromised immune systems have a far greater fatality rate. Some coronavirus test-positive victims also experienced loss of smell and taste while others show gastro-intestinal symptoms.
Although there are viruses with greater fatality rates, this virus appears to be infecting those who can afford to travel, initially causing infection rate disparities among socio-economic groups. According to a report, Dr, Kinda, who specializes in humanitarian missions and emergency response in Africa, notes “since the virus affects mostly people who travel by air, it is not the poorest people, but people who have access to information and know how to report symptoms. It would have taken longer to respond to a disease that appeared in a very poor or inaccessible area.” Community spread cases are caused when a person who recently traveled by air and infect someone in their community who has not recently traveled, accelerating the rate of infection.
Planning Prospective: What we are Learning from COVID-19?
As we are facing an unprecedented pandemic in our lifetime, we are already learning a lot from other countries’ experiences. For one, a national plan of action is absolutely critical. Countries with strong centralized leadership to make life-altering decisions and allocate resources are proving themselves worthy of the challenge.
Regions all over the world are experiencing massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions due to national government mandated stay-at-home and lock-down orders as traffic congestion is massively reduced.
We are learning how policy, economics and planning either influences or is influenced by social behavior in real-time. Ride-hailing services such as Lyft was forced to change their prime business model of passenger ride-share to food delivery. Meanwhile grocery delivery start ups and Amazon are looking to hire tens of thousands of workers as people turn to e-commerce for delivery services.
Prior to Governor Cuomo’s total work-from-home quarantine mandate, bike-share giant, Citibike, seen a surge in trips to more than half a million users in a week, with 517,800 trips between March 1 and March 11, 2020, compared to 310,100 trips during the same period one year earlier. At this time, fear of the virus dictated travel patterns where we’ve seen commuters avoid New York’s subway system, as they were afraid to contract the virus.
“For example, Rwanda installed public hand-washing sinks (before the country’s first confirmed case), created education programs on how to effectively wash your hands, and implemented car-free streets to promote pedestrian social distancing.”
Wildlife in Vienna, Italy are returning as the city’s canals are void of pollution. But at the same time, medical supplies are low and medical professionals are out-supplied. Many nations in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean are scrambling to haphazardly contain the spread of the virus. Meanwhile some nations such as Rwanda and South Korea have taken preventative measures to fight the virus. For example, Rwanda installed public hand-washing sinks (before the country’s first confirmed case), created education programs on how to effectively wash your hands, and implemented car-free streets to promote pedestrian social distancing.
Educational Program in Kigali, Rwanda to Teach Pedestrians How to Effectively Wash Their Hands
Disaster Planning should Include Pandemics
The future of planning is constantly shaped by the problems we currently face. Although there are many historical references to support this claim, Superstorm Sandy is the most recent and relevant example. After Superstorm Sandy devastated the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area, subsequent hurricanes affected various cities throughout the United States and its overseas territories. This forced a reactionary wave of planning curricula, urban policies, plans and guidelines to shift its attention towards resiliency planning and planning for the next Superstorm Sandy. Planners in the workforce, as public officials and private consultants, helped create a wide range of policies to reduce the effect of climate change or mitigate natural disasters on cities and its inhabitants. Natural disasters from hurricanes can cost a local economy billions of dollars, while experts expect a global pandemic of this nature can lead the world into a global depression - surpassing the unemployment rates of the 2008 recession caused by the subprime loan housing crisis. The United States Congressional chambers just passed an unprecedented $2 trillion relief package, in which Majority Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi mentioned is the first of a few to combat a looming recession catalyzed by COVID-19.
Planning for a Pandemic
The future of planning post COVID-19 may be quite interesting. Planning professionals and public health experts need to collaborate more often than before.This pandemic should push planning professionals to develop educational workshops led by public health experts and economists to inform the rest of us how to effectively plan for a pandemic. The aftermath of COVID-19 should compel accredited schools to introduce a range of academic curricula on a broad range of topics from preventive and mitigation measures under the umbrella of “planning for a pandemic”. Under this new planning topic, GIS specialists should help gather information on community resources that are useful tools to combat the pandemic. For example, large convention centers in New York and New Orleans are currently being used as makeshift hospitals as existing hospitals are currently overwhelmed.
Mapping Technology Can Determine Community Resources to help Combat the Virus and Locate Community Spread Cases.
During this pandemic, much of our workforce is at home. Therefore, a plan for non-essential workers to work-from-home should be developed so planning departments can effectively operate business-as-usual while practicing social distance. This would often be a part of an agency’s strategic plan. The strategic plan should also list what policy changes are necessary for local governments to permit virtual public meetings and other “business-as-usual” meetings such as planning boards and zoning boards.
Working from home should urge transit planners to develop plans that would effectively reduce transit service without compromising social distancing rules. Planners and economists should conduct research and influence policy to mitigate economic impacts on local transit service caused by reduced ridership and revenue. Planners should also look at ways micro-mobility may fill those transit service gaps.
In addition, regional coordination is key. For the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut tri-state region, this meant constant communication among the governors to implement effective state-wide quarantine orders or lock-downs. Plans for vulnerable populations such as people experiencing homelessness and people who are incarcerated should be in place to help curve the spread of the virus within these population groups.
History has shown that pandemics do not occur as frequently as natural disasters, but their fatality rates can have devastating impacts. After the SARS epidemic, scientists have warned that pandemics are not an “if it will happen” event, but a “when will it happen” event. As this article was written in the midst of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) global pandemic, we are still learning which practices can help stop the spread as we attempt to live ordinary lives. I will continue to document and report best planning practices and case studies throughout the duration of the pandemic. It is the least I can do as I keep a safe distance and celebrate the hard work our health professionals, store clerks, law enforcement officers, and other essential workers are doing in the front lines.