From the FEMA newsletter

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Over the course of 2007 and early 2008, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) conducted nine regional pandemic preparedness workshops involving all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and four of the five U.S. territories. The workshops were designed to examine state pandemic preparedness, particularly in non-health-related areas such as continuity of government, maintenance of essential services, and coordination with the private sector. The workshops also examined the strengths and weaknesses of coordination activities among levels of government, both vertically (state-federal and state-local) and horizontally (state-state) as well as with the private sector.

This paper presents an overall assessment of the current level of pandemic preparedness in the states, based on the NGA Center's observations and an analysis of the information provided by workshop participants. It focuses specifically on preparedness in four sectors or disciplines that are common to all states—healthcare, commerce, education and public safety—and identifies five broad areas in which new or improved policies, procedures, capabilities or strategies are needed to improve overall pandemic preparedness. They include:

Workforce policies. Every sector of the economy and government will be impacted by the availability of workers during a pandemic. States and the private sector should develop and test policies affecting the willingness and ability of personnel to perform their duties, whether in traditional or alternative settings. They also should work collaboratively to develop policies that effectively balance the need of some workers to care for sick (or healthy) family members for extended periods of time with the requirements of government and private sector continuity of operations plans.

Schools. Additional attention on the range of issues facing the K-12 and higher educational systems is necessary. States should ensure that federal guidance on school closure and reopening is widely disseminated to improve coordination with local authorities, and they should develop public communication strategies to begin educating communities about the purpose and limitations of school closure, associated issues and expected impacts. Colleges and universities have particular challenges that also must be addressed.

Situational awareness. Awareness of the presence or absence of disease at the local, state and national levels is essential to the proper implementation of mitigation strategies in order to realize optimum public health benefits while minimizing negative side effects. However, no system currently exists to provide state officials with a clear picture of the situation in their states, in neighboring states or in other parts of the country.

States should ensure that all agencies are included in information-sharing networks that will be used during a pandemic. The private sector also should be integrated into those networks, and systems should be developed that provide state officials with ready access to information on disease activity, availability of critical supplies, deployed response assets, and other essential data.

Public involvement. To a significant degree, the public has so far been left out of discussions about pandemic preparedness. States should engage the public in deliberations about, and encourage the public to inform decisions on, school closures, the availability of essential services, including healthcare, and other issues with difficult ethical dimensions.

Public-private sector engagement. The interdependencies of the public and private sectors require that policies designed to control the spread of disease at the community level be developed in a collaborative fashion to ensure coordination and to avoid or resolve potential conflict. States in particular should reach out to small business to ensure they are adequately prepared for pandemics and are aware of the resources available to them.

To better understand the full range of a pandemic's potential economic impacts, states should conduct economic impact analyses that indentify the sectors that are most critical to the state economy. Those analyses should serve as the basis of strategies to mitigate the effects of a pandemic of government operations and on day-to-day economic activities.