There are excellent tips of communication on the Peter Sandman site: http://www.psandman.com/ There is a section in fluwiki with sample letters for council, but I have a questions for readers-has anyone brought planning/preparation for a pandemic flu up with any level of local authority ie mayor, office on emergency management, board of health? What was your outcome? What worked-and what didn’t work?
I sent emails to our mayor (as yet, no reply) and to the state epidemiologist.
I received a reply from the Manager, Division of Planning and Promotion, Dept. of Health & Human Services regarding municiple planning matters. In other words, the mayor probably bucked my email to the guy in charge.
It was a nice letter, listing more than a page of recent local accomplishments. His reply came subject to “Constituent Pandemic Flu Preparedness Response”.
I’ll write back and probe a few things that he said or didn’t say that might be more revealing.
The bad news is that most of the things he saw fit to comment seem to have been public health exercises within that bureaucracy, in no way the kind of grassroots participation that would attend awareness of impending danger. I get that they’re waiting for the shoe to drop and nobody here has dropped it. Prolly be bad for Christmas sales.
I also sent slivers of the fluwiki tread about grocery supplies and deliveries to Walmart, Sam’s, Costco, Carr’s and Fred Meyer.
A lady at Costco agreed to send it on to their headquarters. That was my best outcome. On the other hand, some numbnut at Sam’s thanked me for my application for employment. Nothing from the others. Will now escalate based on apparent indifference to my concern.
I went into a local Costco store today, dragged in by my spouse with nothing more to do than look at the HDTV sets…which I completed doing long before she was finished shopping. So, with time on my hands, I decided to walk around and think a bit about the store manager’s problem in an influenza pandemic.
I estimated that I saw 500 to a 1,000 people in the store while I was there. I think the average person might have spent 45 minutes to an hour in the store. It was a pre-Thansgiving weekend crowd, maybe I saw several hundred more today than on an average day.
So in a ten-hour day, maybe as few as 2,000 to 5,000 people would go through the store. On any particular day, that number could be higher or lower.
I’ve see estimates of as many as 2/3 to 1/2 infected in a pandemic, with attack rates of 35% to 15%. Contagion occurrs before and after symptoms develop.
At first, most of the box store patrons would be free of infection and not contagious. Shopping would “normal” so far as real flu risk and shopping behavior were concerned. As infection spread locally, some unsuspecting shoppers would bring the virus into the store. In short order, some suffering mild symptoms would enter the store as well. One imagines those with obvious symptoms would be screened at the door.
Thus, transmission would soon begin within the store, partly due to the interactions of contagious shoppers and partly due to shoppers’ occasional contacts with contaminated surfaces.
As pandemic spread throughout the city, fewer and fewer people would come to the store. I’d guess 90% or more of the merchandise for sale at Costco would be judged “non-essential”, or “discretionary”: for example, lawnmowers, furniture, toys, appliances, and clothing. Given some mortal risk in shopping, people would postpone many of their Costco acquisitions to a later date.
Gradually, day by day, foot traffic would decrease and sales would decline.
At some point, the store might either be closed as a public health risk, or, it might be almost empty of shoppers. With substantially fewer shoppers, a given shopper might have no trouble keeping a safe social distance from other shoppers.
There are many thousands of square feet of surfaces in the store: floors, racks, boxes, cold storage areas, merchandise displays, etc. I couldn’t imagine any way for all of those surfaces to be decontaminated on a regular basis. Some merchandise that was shrink-wrapped might be relatively clean after unwrapping. Again, given 90% or more would be non-essential, it wouldn’t move out of the store, and it might not be touched for months.
What to make of these impressions?
Insofar as necessity and infection control measures allow, manage entry into the store, checkout and other person-to-person transactions so as to keep safe distances.
Arrange the floor so as to give shoppers quick access to high demand items…and then quick exit from the store.
Some thought to plastic gloves and masks. (???)
Some thought to shopping by appointment (???) The number of shoppers would have been greatly reduced.)
Some thought to Internet / telephone shopping and delivery services (???)
These thoughts are just off the top of my head. A brainstorming group of competent professionals could do better.
It occurs to me now (more than previously) that one of the reasons that American business and Americans in general are so seemingly reluctant to be engaged to this problem is that if it happens, so many businesses will soon come to a screeching halt. So much will change.
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