Plague drills, pre-and post-COVID-19

The five-day operation - called T-REX for Transportation Relay Exercise - kicked off from Tumwater with air and ground logistics utilized to deliver one million simulated doses of vaccine from the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to county and tribal health care centers, pharmacies and related locations, including those in Okanogan County and on the Colville Confederated Tribes reservation. From what I could gather at the time for a story that appeared in the March 9, 2019, issue of The Quad, the exercise went well.

Two key points are assumed here:

1. The existence of a vaccine to effectively combat the simulated plague.

2. The SNS maintained the requisite supplies.

In light of present circumstances surrounding a true pandemic, I have reached out to our own Okanogan County Public Health (OCPH), Emergency Management, Mid-Valley Hospital, Three Rivers Hospital, and Economic Alliance for their feedback specific to recommendations they might suggest be implemented in the wake of the real thing. I did so to get some firsthand comments from frontline contacts who are dealing with the crisis on both the public health, safety and economic levels.

In the meantime, here is what I do know. In just about every category – productions, supplies, logistics, funding, strategy, economics - the nation’s leadership was ill-prepared for this crisis.

This even though a national plague scenario, first conducted by the Obama administration, was replayed from January through August just last year for and with Trump administration officials. Administered by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the simulation was designed to measure the capacity of the federal government, a dozen participating states, including Illinois, and another dozen federal agencies to respond to a contagious disease like swine flu or H1N1, the first flu pandemic since the Hong Kong flu in 1968.

The exercise, called Crimson Contagion, was modeled on a new, highly communicable flu strain for which there was no vaccine. The simulated outbreak started in China and was quickly spread by world travelers. In the U.S. it was first detected in Chicago and by the time the World Health Organization declared a pandemic less than two months later more than 100 million Americans were predicted to become infected and resulted in millions hospitalized and more than half a million dead.

Crimson Contagion was useful to the extent that its sobering conclusions exposed the lack of preparation, coordination, funding and other shortcomings now playing out in many prescient respects in real terms with real consequences. When the New York Times got its hands on a previously undisclosed October 2019 draft of Crimson Contagion the report appeared to contradict the Trump administration’s claims that nobody on his watch could see a pandemic of this proportion coming.

Apparently, some could and did. Look it up; it is not fake news.

In fairness to the president, had he possessed the foresight to envision what a pandemic like COVID-19 would do to the linchpin of his reelection - the nation’s economy – I suspect his response would have come much earlier and with more exertion. Needless to say, the next plague “simulation” will have the benefit of hard experience and hindsight and will play to a much more receptive audience. As Bob Dylan wrote in Subterranean Homesick Blues: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

All good medicine, citizens.