Disaster expert: Area needs coronavirus task force.
As the world struggled Monday to slow the spread of the fastmoving COVID-19 coronavirus, Houston leaders and individuals were asking: What’s our area’s plan? Who’s in charge? With a situation that changes by the hour, who’s telling us what to do?
Sunday afternoon, hours before the Centers for Disease Control recommended limiting gatherings to no more than 50 people, the Houston Children’s Museum announced that it would close to the public on Monday — but did so only after reading a reporter’s social-media post about the increasing scientific evidence that children with no symptoms can carry high loads of the virus and transmit it to people who might die.
Tammie Kahn, the museum’s executive director, said that no one from the city of Houston, Harris County or state of Texas had offered organizations such as hers concrete advice about the confusing, fast-changing situation.
“We want to serve Houston,” Kahn said. “We’re horrified that we could have put anybody in jeopardy. We’ve been cleaning our heads off.”
Angela Blanchard, president emerita of Houston’s BakerRipley, teaches a disaster-reponse graduate course at Brown University. The Houston area, she said, needs to establish a clear, transparent group of people, from various sectors, who speak reliably each day on the COVID-19 challenges facing the area.
Similar regional task forces are commonly established for hurricanes. But for no such task force has been convened for COVID-19.
“It’s not what needs to be done,” said Blanchard. “It’s who needs to be talking as we do it — who needs to be at the table.”
Successful disaster responses across the world, she said, always involve clear, speedy updates by a small unified body of leaders from different sectors, such as health, education and business.
“Each day we learn more information — more information about cases, more information about tests, more information about our capacity to help, heal, serve and care for people,” said Blanchard. “That information needs to be out there, so that each individual leader of each institution has the information to decide what to do.”
“We’re not moving at the speed of need,” said Blanchard. “In crisis, what makes a leader is the ability to move at the speed of information. Organizations’ leaders right now are scared to go first, to go it alone, to be the first to shut things down or take any other needed action. They’re on the verge of being too cowardly to act.”