CommentsONE MAN’S OPINION-Protocols are established procedures to do some task. Some are obvious such as putting the toothpaste on the toothbrush before brushing your teeth.
Others are complicated such as cleansing a grocery store during a Pandemic. The hardest protocols to follow are brand new ones which are contrary to long standing habits, e.g. standing 6 feet apart.
Pandemics Requires New Protocols
Mankind has experienced pandemics since prehistoric times. A few during recorded history are: The plague of Athens, 430 BCE, The Black Plague in Asia and Europe in the 1300s, The Great London Plague 1665-1666, The American plagues of the 1600s which wiped out millions of indigenous people, The Spanish Flu of 1918-1920, the Asian Flu of 1957-1958 which began in Singapore in February 1957, and reached the United States in the summer of 1957. The worldwide death toll was over 1 million with 116,000 to 165,000 deaths in the United States.
To put it politely, any United States leader who says that the current Viral Pandemic was unforeseen is a “fucking moron,” to quote former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Those who fare worse morally than Donald Trump are the Washington elite, who knew that the Pandemic was headed towards us and that Trump was mentally incapable of comprehending the impending disaster. Yet, they remained silent. Not only had Trump disbanded the Pandemic Response team, but he was also doing nothing to prepare. Worse yet, the other Washington leaders knew that Trump was spreading ignorance about the virus being a hoax and fake news or some plot to discredit his Administration. In brief, his actions were guaranteeing a deadly pandemic which could kill 2.2 million Americans. Now the threat is down to between 100,000 and 240,000 dead.
Obvious Protocols
When a pandemic approaches, a nation needs to already have protocols to be rapidly implemented. The “protocolers” are divided into two basic groups: Designers and Implementers. The designers are the experts in the federal government, who know how pandemics operate and the new procedures that a nation will need to protect the people. People cannot change overnight from normal daily routines to suddenly washing their hands constantly. People cannot stop touching their faces, nor can people disinfect their hands each time they enter and leave a grocery store without practice. One prepares for a pandemic the same way one reaches Carnegie Hall, “practice, practice, practice.” But first, someone must design and test the new protocols.
Tiers of Protocols
The first level would be to stop the virus. Identify, Swarm and Quarantine
There must be enough test kits, PPE and personnel to identify the virus. Today, April 1, 2020, we learn that the first cases in Los Angeles were probably in February, but no one had prepared the medical community. Thus, we failed to identify the novel virus, swarm the patients and hunt down and test all his/her contacts and then quarantine them. Thus, the pandemic took hold unseen because we had no protocol to identify it.
Early on, Washington’s most important objective was to protect Trump’s ego. Thus, the public was misled into thinking that asymptomatic people could not spread the virus, when the experts knew the opposite was true. If the public knew the truth, then they’d demand tests, but we had virtually none.
The reason we lacked tests is that Trump refused to order them in January. The result was to let people believe that the young and the asymptomatic could not spread the virulent disease so that people would not then demand widespread testing of the asymptomatic. Florida’s GOP governor let Spring Break party-on and then disperse the disease throughout the nation as the Spring Breakers returned home.
The second tier would be to prepare businesses. The likelihood of total success with Identify, Swarm and Quarantine is rather slim. Public health officials needed to design back-up levels. While the average man on the street could not have foreseen this, during a pandemic, mass distribution centers of food and other items became distribution centers of the virus. Starting in January, all grocery chains should have been buying PPE for their employees and mastering anti-viral protocols such as constant temperature taking and anti-viral disinfecting.
Invoke the Stafford Act
Perhaps the single best thing Trump could have done in early January 2020 would have been to invoke The Stafford Act for the mass production of masks, tests kits, PPE, and protocols. An additional benefit of the President’s invoking the Stafford Act in January is that it would have sent a shock wave to awaken the nation. Of course, there would have been political fallout, but one of the protocols a Pandemic team needed to design should have been a system to handle the naysayers.
Implementation
Because practice makes perfect, many protocols should have been taught to school children, e.g., hygiene involving the of washing hands, not touching doorknobs, not letting parents touch handles on gasoline pumps, and following the game plan of social distancing. After the designers saw how children might misuse protocols and procedures, they could redesign them.
The Implementors Need Protocols
On the West Coast, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti merits the award of Implementor Grandissimo, but he was given defective protocols. Designing protocols was not part of his job description; the same goes for Governor Newsom and on the East Coast, for Governor Cuomo. They had to devise on the fly.
Mayor Garcetti used the good name “Safer at Home,” but no one knew how to be Safer at Home with our conflicting rules: no group larger than 10, stay six feet away, go outside and exercise, shopping is essential, bend the curve. Had Trump’s original Pandemic Team run scientific tests about which memes were most effective in messaging the protocols? No. Because Trump had abolished that team, we had no protocols to test.
We had zero practice implementing any of these protocols and who really knew what the memes meant? Few understood that staying six feet away applied to the individuals in the groups of less than ten. People thought that if their groups of friends on the beach were less than 10 in number, that was OK. Obviously, stay six feet away didn’t apply to married couples or for your children. Why stay six feet away outside in the fresh air when you’re all sitting on top of each other watching the Covid-19 News Update while inside?
This confusion stemmed from the untested messaging from the federal government. No one had developed protocols in advance and then tested the messaging of them. Everything in science needs to be tested, including protocols and their memes. Also, Trump was consistently downplaying the seriousness and pretending the threat would be over by Easter.
The meme which I’m sure was never scientifically tested for efficacy was “Bend the Curve.” If a rabid dog is charging at your kid, do you say, “Be cautious of furry creatures?” How about “Stop the Spike” or even “Kill the Surge.”
Garcetti had to correct in mid-stream when he saw hordes of people at Venice Beach and in Runyon Canyon. Who knew stay six feet apart applied to hiking trails? The Garcetti directive I liked best was when his inner-Jewish mother broke lose, and he demanded, “Stop doing it.”
Protocols save lives but a lack of tested protocols kills.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Image. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
