Planning for hurricane in COVID-19

THE 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was a record for named storms – 30 in all. Seven, or 23 per cent of the storms, developed after September, of which five were hurricanes, four of them major ones. Indeed, by September 20, with 21 named storms having already formed, and the preseason list of names already used up, meteorologists had to reach for the Greek alphabet to name new storms.

Happily, Jamaica suffered neither a direct hit nor a sideswipe from the plethora of storms. Which does not mean that the island was not affected. Indeed, between late October and early November, which should have been the tail end of the season, hurricanes Zeta and Eta, respectively, dumped millions of tonnes of rain on the island, causing flood and landslides as well as damage to property, infrastructure and agriculture. Even before these events, earlier in the seasons, heavy rains, associated with lower-pressure systems, also caused infrastructure damage and agricultural loss.

The scale of the October-November event, however, appeared to concentrate the minds, although only two people died – a man and his daughter, when their home at Shooters Hill, north of the capital, was buried by a landslide.

It, however, could easily have been many more. At Bull Bay, in the east, overflowing rivers reclaimed their floodplains, destroying homes built on them. At informal hillside settlements, homes collapsed or were left perched precariously at the edge of newly sculpted precipices. In some places, historic mountain roads were washed away, marooning communities.

“I am just sounding the alarm,” Prime Minister Andrew Holness said in relation to some of the squatter and informal communities in the aftermath of the landslides and floods. “...We cannot have some of these communities continuing to exist in these areas in the face of the weather effects that are projected to happen on a cyclical basis. At some point, the nation will have to confront this thing, that because of political expediency, we have allowed some communities to exist, but now these communities are at risk.”

The Government has, perhaps, been distracted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Which might explain why, except for insubstantial remarks by the housing and climate change minister, Pearnel Charles Jr, so little has been said about policy for at-risk communities in the time since Prime Minister Holness’ parliamentary statement last November.

The distractions of the COVID-19 notwithstanding, it is important that Jamaica begins aggressively to address the dangers Jamaica’s many unplanned and informal settlements might face from severe weather events, which are increasingly likely as a consequence of global warming.

But the country will, especially in the short term, have to address these issues in difficult and complex circumstances. The Government, therefore, should be planning for all eventualities. We are, therefore, surprised that after last year, and with only two months to the start of the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season, so little has been made of it by the Government and its disaster preparedness and mitigation officials. Articulated differently, we expected to have heard by now how the Government is planning for the hurricane season in the context of the pandemic.

It is true that COVID-19 was around during last year’s hurricane season. But at the start of June 2020, Jamaica had 588 confirmed COVID-19 cases and nine deaths. At the hurricane season’s official end on November 30, there were 10,810 cases and 258 deaths, an expansion helped by last September’s general election, the campaign for which became a superspreader event. By the start of this week, the COVID-19 cases had risen to over 45,000, with more than 760 deaths, an increase of more than 1,300 and 51 per cent respectively.

The upshot: Jamaica will face significant logistical and public-health challenges should a weather event in the coming hurricane season forces the Government to relocate people and place them in shelters. Indeed, despite this week’s receipt of 55,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine, a shortage of a drug means that relatively few people will be inoculated against COVID-19 by the start of the hurricane season. If the new delivery is put in people’s arms in short order, fewer than 200,000 people would still have received a single dose of the two-dose vaccine. And there is some uncertainty, in the short term, where the additional doses will come from to meet the Government’s target of fully vaccinating around 1.9 million people, or around two-thirds of the population, by next March in order to achieve herd immunity against COVID-19.

Against this backdrop, the Government has to be careful that activities relating to hurricane mitigation do not translate to superspreader events. Preventing this has to be part and parcel of mitigation planning. Such matters, therefore, cannot be left for the last minute.

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