What follows is a guest posting from Mr. Ian McLean, a retired public official in NZ.  Comments from readers are invited.

A significant strategic issue emerging from the pandemic seems to me to be this: In almost every country, the Covid pandemic required management skills and capacity beyond those available in ‘business as usual’ within the government structure.

Existing structures were severely challenged in most countries, but skills and capacity were developed to deal with the pandemic. These skills will decay in time, with an expected half life significantly less than the expected return period of another pandemic based on historical events. Unless deliberate action is taken, in the next pandemic governments will again have to again re-invent structures to manage it.

Despite many skills required by the pandemic being substantially technical in nature and related to the disease and its impact, substantial management and administrative skills are not health-specific. These include decisive decision making, rapid expansion of organizational capacity, fast development of new logistics systems, and mobilization of assistance from external agencies both within government and in civil society.

These skills are available to a considerable extent in government agencies including the military, first responder emergency services, and civil defence/emergency management. But they are not otherwise required or available as core skills in government agencies in NZ and many other countries, – especially in those agencies whose focus is planning and administration. Where the prime task of a government entity is planning or monitoring other entities, the ability to take action taken quickly and effectively is not a key attribute in recruitment of staff. Good planners, even superb planners, are not necessarily effective managers.

In NZ, both the military and police are playing a vital role in assisting the management of the Covid pandemic. But neither is equipped by culture and training for the core role of managing the government response. The military are neither trained nor skilled in the breadth and depth of interaction with civil society  and the population that is required with  a pandemic like Covid (although they have done very well during Covid, as in major natural disasters). The police do not have the logistics capacity and skills for a major operation of this kind, nor the required linkages with the cooperating agencies in civil society.

An important aspect is the coordination of the various government agencies involved in managing a pandemic. In NZ the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) is the obvious candidate to undertake logistics and similar non-technical functions during a pandemic. It would need to be strengthened and redirected towards operational rather than planning priorities in order to do this.

The advantages of such an an arrangement are threefold:

1. Learnings from the management of the pandemic would be preserved and kept fresh in an agency focused on emergencies
2. The management of other emergencies would learn from the experience of managing the pandemic
3. Strengthening NEMA’s role in pandemics would make it stronger to deal with other emergencies.

Similar integration of non-technical aspects of the pandemic management with emergency management may well be worth considering in other countries.

From the Wash Post: We can build homes to survive tornadoes like Kentucky suffered. We just haven’t. The housing industry and politicians have resisted changes that could save lives

From Axious: Study:10 biggest climate disasters of 2021 cost $170 billion in damages

From the WashPost: In rural Kentucky, small towns were already on the margins. Then came the tornadoes.

From the WashPost: In Amsterdam, floating homes show the world how to live alongside nature

(1) From the Wash Post: Devastated by a tornado 10 years ago, Joplin, Mo., offers lessons in what comes next

(2) Note from the Diva: A full chapter is devoted to the details of the Joplin recovery in our recent book, U.S. Emergency Management in the 21st Century, by Rubin and Cutter. That book was reviewed on this site in 2020 at this location.

(3)The ASCE has opened its archive: https://ascelibrary.org/tornado?utm_campaign=PUB-20211221-SEI+Alert&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Eloqua&. In response to recent tornados in the Midwest, ASCE Library has opened the SEI-sponsored book on the Joplin, Missouri tornado in 2011, as well as assembled the following papers, to help structural engineers understand the vulnerabilites of buildings, and better mitigate damage. This collection is freely available through February 28, 2022.

E-book: Joplin, Missouri, Tornado of May 22, 2011: Structural Damage Survey and Case for Tornado-Resilient Building Codes. Authors: By David O. Prevatt, Ph.D., P.E.; William Coulbourne, P.E.; Andrew J. Graettinger, Ph.D.; Shiling Pei, Ph.D., P.E.; Rakesh Gupta, Ph.D.; and David Grau, Ph.D.

(Thanks to Chris Jones for this source.)

From the HSDL: GAO Investigates Disaster Recovery Barriers.

This article focuses on federal actions.

Surviving the Storm Is Just the Beginning. This is the case with most American disasters. Recovery is an uphill battle that takes years and sometimes decades.

Be sure to see the reply posted by Prof. Rob Olshansky, a noted recovery researcher.

New CRS Report (31pp): FEMA Hazard Mitigation: A First Step
Towards Climate Adaptation

State Pandemic Scorecard. For the past year, POLITICO’s Recovery Lab project has been chronicling how the pandemic is playing out around the country with a special eye to the innovations and policies enacted by officials at the state and local levels. We’ve noticed differences in how the pandemic has affected states, but it’s been hard to figure out just how large, and how meaningful, those differences have been. Some of the differences were the result of inherent factors, like the makeup of a state’s economy, including how dependent
it is on tourism. But some differences were also the result of decisions made by public officials.

More than 18 months into the pandemic, the impacts of those decisions are showing up in data that can be tracked and evaluated. This scorecard pulls that data together in an accessible format that readers can use to see how policy trade-offs have played out so far in each state, and help inform state responses going forward.