A brief critique of UK emergency arrangements in the light of the Covid-19 crisis

The current system for managing major incidents and disasters in the United Kingdom was devised after the Broadwater Farm, Tottenham, riots of 1986 and reflects a preoccupation with public order. The lineaments of the system reflect military practice.

In the world as a whole, there has been a gradual process of demilitarisation of emergency response. Moreover, where innovation flourishes it has been accompanied by a reduction in authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, in Britain, there were shortcomings in the response to the 1999 Ladbroke Grove train crash, particularly in the treatment of the survivors. The same shortcomings were present in the 2005 London bombings, as were others (for example, the way in which 'major incident' as declared). In 2017, the responses to the Manchester Arena bombings and the Grenfell Tower fire were substantially criticised. According to the Kerslake report, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service was "brought to a point of paralysis" during the response to the Arena bombing. In Grenfell Tower, London Fire Brigade used the wrong tactic and were comprehensively criticised by HM Inspectorate.

In making these observations I do wish to acknowledge the superb dedication and professionalism of members of the emergency services. What is lacking is a proper system that would make the best of their skills.

JESIP, the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Principles project has been widely described as worthy but ineffective. Training for major emergencies is insufficient and poorly managed.

We call flooding that stretches from Yorkshire to Somerset "a major incident". And by the way, according to the Environment Agency, one third of existing UK flood defences are liable to fail, while others are controversial or lacking. Coronavirus, which has killed 120,000 people, infected four million and brought the economy to its knees is also "a major incident". Let's lay it on the line: these are disasters.

In the case of coronavirus, the medical profession has taken control of the agenda, yet most of the failings--and there are many--refer to civil protection issues: communications, logistics, coordination. Most striking is the abyss between plans and the ability to implement them with emergency response measures. Let us remember that, where foresight should have been exercised, improvisation can all too easily be regarded as negligence.

In the United Kingdom, the status of emergency planning has declined while it has been enhanced in other countries. Absurdly, it is not treated as a profession and has no career progression or higher education requirements (I should add that the field has an intellectual history that stretches back 101 years).

The 2004 Civil Contingencies Act has been sidelined throughout the Coronavirus disaster. Now every country needs a basic law that broadly specifies the organisation and structure of the civil protection system, and how it works. Examples are the Stafford Act in the USA, the Disaster Management Act of India and Law 225 of 1992 in Italy. Failure to utilise the basic law is an indication that it is not fit for purpose. It is unconscionable that major emergencies be managed without a basic law and there are many reasons why the Coronavirus Act is not an acceptable substitute.

In the UK emergency planners do not manage the events they plan for. This is because the concept of 'command' eclipses that of 'coordination' (and also because of the low status of this field). A gulf has therefore developed between plans and the ability to activate them. The worst consequences of this have been experienced with Covid-19, quite possibly with the avoidable loss of tens of thousands of lives and tens of billions of pounds.

Modern emergency management is based on coordination and cooperation. It is more a question of apportioning tasks and resources than commanding people. Moreover, it is inclusive. There is some evidence to suggest that, on aggregate, women make better emergency managers than men do. Inclusiveness should extend to the needs of minorities, BAME, but also people with disabilities, who constitute one seventh of the population.

The challenge of the 21st century is to make civil protection an inclusive process. People must take more responsibility, collectively, for the risks they run. They must participate in safety and crisis response issues. The age of spontaneous voluntarism is over: that of organised voluntarism is in full swing. Civil society organisations should be a full, incorporated part of the system, as they are in Italy, Germany and Sweden.

I believe substantial changes are needed. We should accept that we have disasters in the UK. We should acknowledge that they require a proper, fully articulated structure and a system to manage them, backed by renewed national legislation. Let us replace doctrine by 'plans' and 'procedures'. Let us replace major incident by 'major emergency' and 'disaster'. Let us modernise the culture of civil protection.

Where emergency and disaster responses are overcentralised, they fail. In this respect, negative lessons can be learned from France, positive ones from Sicily, where the autonomy statutes gained by the region and its nine provinces were a major stimulus for the improvement of civil protection plans and practices. Creating a system that is solidly based on the local authority (and properly funded at that level), coordinated regionally and harmonised and supported nationally is now a vital British imperative.

With thanks to Mr Tony Moore for his observations and guidance.

 

The 1980 Southern Italian Earthquake After Forty Years

 

Laviano, Province of Avellino, 1984

Monday 23rd November 2020 at 19:34 and 52.8 seconds marked the fortieth anniversary of the 1980 southern Italian earthquake in which I was directly involved as a survivor. The magnitude 6.9 tremors killed 2,914 people and injured 8,848. About 280,000 people were left homeless (including myself) and damage was reported from 628 municipalities.  In the epicentral area, 36 towns were completely destroyed. The anniversary provided an opportunity to look back at the event and consider how the recovery process fared. It is salutary to reflect that many of those scholars who have studied this disaster are too young to have experienced it.

The year 1980 was something of a watershed in the field of disaster risk reduction (or disaster management as it was then known). Civil protection, in the form of locally-based disaster response capacity, would begin to emerge in the following decade, which would end with the inauguration of the United Nations Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. The incessant, cumulative hammer-blow effect of disasters of all kinds on modern society had begun to stimulate a consistent demand for greater safety and security. It would soon become imperative to satisfy the demand with far-reaching changes in the organisation of the response to major emergencies.

During the early aftermath I corresponded with Senator Edward Kennedy about the American response to the disaster in the Campania and Basilicata regions of southern Italy. It was clear that the US Government was influenced by the suffering and the shortcomings of the response to the tragedy as it built up its own capacity to respond to natural hazard impacts. The Italian disaster came only 18 months after President Jimmy Carter had signed the US Federal Emergency Management Agency into being, and FEMA was still finding its feet.

The initial response to the disaster in Italy was slow and chaotic enough instantly to become a national scandal. It culminated in the issuance by Sandro Pertini, the President of the Republic, of a stern and very public rebuke to the government of prime minister Arnaldo Forlani. More positively, the shortcomings in the response set in motion a long process of creating a viable modern civil protection service at all levels, from national to local.

The reconstruction was a long-drawn out process. For example, in the town of Salvitelle (1981 population 952), in the mountains of the Province of Salerno, it took 17 years. This small, ancient hilltop settlement was completely ruined. With participation and oversight from the University of Florence's Department of Architecture, it was carefully reconstructed to anti-seismic standards, with full restoration of its historic buildings and the original character of its built environment.

In 1980 there was much to learn about recovery from disasters in the modern world. As a result, one study estimated that 14 different models of reconstruction were applied in the disaster zone. Although it was relatively well connected by modern highways, the area had the reputation of being remote, wild and very much an economic backwater. Attempts to create industrial growth poles came quickly to a predictable end as the firms attracted to them took the subsidies and closed up shop as soon possible. Nonetheless, there were some surprising victories in the food processing and automotive sectors. For the local economy, all was not lost, or not quite all.

For many years after the disaster local people lived in 40-square-metre wooden prefabricated homes, the transitional housing provided by the government. There were some very large encampments, notably Bucaletto in Potenza city, the capital of Basilicata region. There was some sense that these places had become ghettoes for the disadvantaged. A parish priest, whose first name was Dante, wrote a long poem called The Divine Comedy Brought Up to Date, in which the third tier of Hell was inhabited entirely by earthquake survivors housed in everlasting temporary accommodation. In some towns the huts are still there, decades after they were first erected. Most are used as holiday accommodation for émigrés who return to their home towns during the summer vacation period.

The smallest municipality in Campania region is Romagnano al Monte (1981 population 477). The original settlement is draped spectacularly across a spur of a mountain with a precipitous drop into a gorge of the Melandro River. It was ruined and completely abandoned after the earthquake. A new town was built a short distance away, although the town hall and coffee bar remained in huts. Ever since the disaster the local administration has been struggling to rehabilitate the original settlement, which lies decaying and cordoned off. They have managed to build an information technology centre and a museum within the ruins, but not to restore the parish church, town hall and attractive urban fabric. This rather bizarre and dysfunctional strategy is purely the result of the pattern of availability of money. The European Union's regional fund financed the new buildings, but the town could only access money to build specific types of structure. At present rates it will take centuries to complete the rebuilding, but there is little chance that more funds can be generated and the local economy is one of the most depressed in Europe.

The epicentral area of the 1980 earthquake takes the name Irpinia, after an ancient Latin dialect word for wolf. The positive aspect of the reconstruction is that it did eventually happen, despite all the problems of economic marginalisation and low priority on the national agenda. It proved to be a crucible of experimentation in architectural, engineering and urban planning terms. The results are highly variable both in terms of their effectiveness and their aesthetic worth. Towns like Senerchia and Lioni were rebuilt in situ. Some, like Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi, worked hard to recreate the original genius loci, or spirit of place: others did not. Conza di Campania and Romagnano al Monte were rebuilt from scratch on green-field sites, posing the problem of what to do with the ruins. In Conza they are used for summer festivals, but the effect is at best bitter-sweet. In Senerchia the cumulative effect of ruination by centuries of seismic activity has created something like the levels of excavation of ancient Troy or Knossos. Comprehensively, there is much to study in the reconstruction of Irpinia, and much food for thought in the problems confronted and solutions invented.

Four Questions About the Covid-19 Pandemic

1. What are, and have been, the key challenges in coping with the Covid-19 pandemic?

The first challenge is to understand the behaviour of an emerging disease caused by a new variant of a virus. This concerns its infectiousness, mode of transmission, lethality, symptoms and effects, mutation, longevity on various kinds of surface, and so on. Information on these characteristics takes a long time to assemble, as at the start the virus is new and unknown, its relationship with the host population is unknown and its ability to disseminate is also unknown.

Viral pandemics can have impacts that are as significant in the socio-economic field as they are in epidemiology and viral medicine. The epidemiological approach to the virus involves constantly tracking the progress of the disease and applying measures where it flares up. It also involves promoting appropriate forms of behaviour, principally the need to practise good hygiene, physical distancing and sanitisation of environments. Hospitals need to develop very substantial surge capacity and greatly increase their infection control measures. This may involve deploying field hospitals and using the resources of military medicine.

In the socio-economic sphere, welfare suddenly becomes a vitally important issue. Basic services depend on the work of people who are in the front line of infection, such as nurses, doctors, carers, cleaners and delivery drivers. They will need a constant supply of adequate personal protective equipment. Huge changes in the pattern of demand and supply will occur during a pandemic. Sectors such as travel, hospitality, tourism, retail, the arts and entertainment will suffer closures and reorganisations. Income support will be vitally important. Lockdowns will seriously affect people's mental health.

Specific challenges involve safeguarding the residents and staffs of care homes. Covid-19 is far more lethal for frail elderly people than it is for other categories of the population. Outbreaks in care homes need to be prevented by extraordinary distancing, sanitising and protection measures. Provision of continuity of care for people with non-Covid illnesses is also a major problem. When hospital capacity is absorbed by large influxes of people suffering from Covid, the tendency is to defer treatment of patients with other illnesses. This can lead to widespread failure to diagnose and treat life-threatening and seriously debilitating conditions. It can also lead to treatment that fails because it is applied too late in the development of illnesses such as fast-growing cancers. Finally, Covid-19 can have a disproportionate impact on people with disabilities. As the range of disabilities is very wide, the effects are highly varied and they require a variety of different solutions and remedies.

Amid all the risks associated with a pandemic the policing function is important. In the interests of safeguarding the entire population, restrictions on personal freedom are necessary. These need to be measured, proportional to the risk and applied with fairness and a degree of tolerance.

2. Can we draw on expertise in the field of disaster risk management?

We can regard Covid-19 as a 'wave-disaster'. It is characterised by fluxes of infection and a wide geographical spread of 'flare-ups', which leads to a constantly changing, highly dynamic situation. Under such circumstances, disaster risk management is vitally important, especially as one is dealing with a medical emergency and a social, economic and psychological one.

It is necessary to understand people's perceptions of and attitudes to risk. Human behaviour must be studied and comprehended under the unusual conditions of lockdown, and amidst the far-reaching changes in employment, personal freedom, the risk of illness and the morale of people who suffer disruption to their normal lives.

Although the medical, virological and epidemiological aspects of a pandemic are obviously vital and extremely complex, as an emergency and disaster, the outbreak must be managed with many of the tools and precepts that apply to other kinds of crisis. It is important to understand the relative nature of risk in geographical terms, with respect to the co-occurrence of different kinds of risk, and so as to prioritise risk management interventions.

Emergency planning is an essential tool in the response to a pandemic. Planning is more a process than an outcome. It helps anticipate needs and therefore create the conditions in which preparations can be made to satisfy them. Emergency response has three ingredients: plans, procedures and improvisation. The plans orchestrate the procedures. They ensure that responsibilities are fully assigned, that participants in the response have well-defined roles and that needs are identified in time to supply them. As all emergencies contain some final, irreducible uniqueness, improvisation cannot be ruled out. However, it needs to be reduced to a minimum. Otherwise, the result is tantamount to negligence, a failure to anticipate needs in time to prepare for them. Detailed scenarios of a major viral pandemic have existed since the mid-2000s. They gave the opportunity to recognise what would need to be done during a viral emergency, what equipment and preparations would be needed, and now society would abruptly change.

Communication is a vital element of the pandemic response. It should be honest, open, transparent, measured, consistent, frequent and clear. Moreover, leaders must lead by example, as this is an essential means of maintaining the consistency in communication. There is no virtue in minimising the problems associated with facing up to the pandemic. There should be no exaggeration, distortion or concealment of the facts. Building a relationship of trust with the recipients of information, particularly with the general population, is the only way of inducing people to follow sensible regulations.

3. What should be the role of civil protection on a national and international level in this context?

No matter how large they are, all disasters are local events. The theatre of operations is invariably local. Because of the vast scale of the resources needed to manage a viral pandemic, the response must be national. Moreover, the global nature of the crisis places emphasis on international coordination of the response: sharing data, following other countries' good practices, learning from the experience of other countries, and practising international solidarity, for example in access to vaccines, palliative drugs and the fruits of research. However, the pandemic must be managed at the local level. This means that coordination between national, regional and local authorities needs to be strong and extensive. Higher levels of government need fully to support local efforts to bring the pandemic under control.

Countries need to have good, robust, extensive civil protection systems with well-thought-out national coordination systems and a strong local presence throughout the country. These systems are usually established by the passing of a national law that sets up and defines the system and specifies how it will function. Flanking civil protection, there needs to be a national higher institute of health, or similar organisation designed to manage the public health elements of a disease.

In all disasters, there is a tension between centralisation and devolution. In most countries, an excessively centralised response to the pandemic will be less than optimal because it will not promote responses that are sufficiently tailored to local realities. On the other hand, local authorities should not be abandoned as they struggle to bring the disease under control. Local services understand local conditions much better than external forces do, and for this reason they need to have a lead role, and executive authority, in managing the event, but they need to be endowed with adequate resources to be able to do so.

4. What important lessons are to be learned?

The first lesson of the Covid-19 pandemic is that there was a need to develop and take heed of international monitoring and to put measures in place quickly. Prompt reaction to the threat and the evolving situation was capable of saving many lives. This was contingent upon having plans that would enable the reaction to take place.

The second lesson is that there could be a gap, an abyss even, between a pandemic plan and its ability to be activated. For example, one of the most essential aspects to be planned and managed is the supply chain network. Personal protective equipment, palliative drugs, ventilators and other materials and supplies needed to be stockpiled and the stockpiled maintained over time. If this could not be done, there needed to be pre-arranged agreements to manufacture equipment and supplies very rapidly and predetermined logistical supply-lines. Improvisation of supply and logistics could prove to be lethal. Blockages, chronic shortages and imbalances would be inevitable.

The third lesson is the importance of regional and local approaches to managing the crisis, coordinated and harmonised (or at least mediated) nationally. Many national initiatives have failed or have proved to be inappropriate or wrongly calibrated for particular local areas. While one has to avoid interregional chaos, highly centralised command and supply is also ineffective.

The fourth lesson is that communication must be clear, consistent, honest, open, transparent and frequent. The problems must not be obscured or minimised. The response must be fair and equitable. Authorities and politicians must work hard to build up a relationship of trust with the public. The aim should be to build a consensus about responsible behaviour and sharing the burden.

Covid-19 has produced an existential crisis, not in the sense that the existence of the human race is threatened, but because it calls into question the very bases of modern life. Welfare, equity and the right to life, employment and basic necessities are all strongly implicated. Fighting the pandemic is a matter of collective action. It requires collective effort and discipline. Institutional and political responses must take this fully into account.

State of the Nation - a UK Perspective on Covid-19

Since the start of the crisis, I have constantly affirmed that the key to understanding the effects of this pandemic is the UK Government's failure to give adequate weight to emergency planning and management (Alexander 2020a, 2020b). Although the virological, medical and epidemiological problems are obviously very complex, medical scientists - and politicians - should not be making risk management and logistical decisions if they do not have the expertise. Yet the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts include no experts on managing emergencies, even though this is the most extensive, and perhaps the most profound, emergency that the country has faced in the last 75 years.

Response to disasters (and this pandemic is very much a disaster) consists of plans, procedures and improvisation. If the last of these is excessive - as it has been for the last half a year - this amounts to negligence, understood as failure to foresee and prepare for the foreseeable. The scenario for this pandemic (excluding the recovery) was fully formulated over the period 2003-2009. I have taught it every year since then. Since 2008, pandemics have been top of the list of 96 threats and hazards in the UK National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies in all editions. There were major exercises on pandemics in 2005, 2007 and 2016. Plans were made in the UK in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2014. The problem has been the abyss between planning, preparedness and practice. The last two of these were either not developed enough or were allowed to lapse. The plans were not connected to anything. The exercises revealed, for example, that special attention needed to be given to protecting the residents of care homes (PHE 2017, pp. 24-25). This provision was not implemented and the result appears to have been thousands of avoidable deaths.

Covid-19 has revealed that the UK civil protection system is inadequate. No country other than the UK has spontaneously abandoned its basic law on emergency management (in this case the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004). Its replacement with a long and rambling piece of ad hoc legislation that veers from the draconian to the incomprehensible and back again is more reminiscent of North Korea or Belarus than it is of a western democracy. Failure to develop the civil protection system and, crucially, failure to develop and modernise the culture of civil protection, has allowed the survival of a structure that is antiquated, ossified and largely incapable of responding adequately to major contingencies. In Britain, we do not even use the word 'disaster' even when we are looking down the barrel of such a phenomenon.

Mind-bogglingly vast sums of money have been wasted on initiatives that have failed, such as the contact app and test-and-trace systems. Strenuous efforts have been made to improvise in but a few days structures that should take years of painstaking work to create, moreover by paying exorbitant fees to people who have no expertise in the work in question. Personal protective equipment has been improvised when it should have been either stockpiled or subject to pre-arranged accelerated manufacturing contracts, and some of it has proved unusable.

Civil protection is a grass-roots enterprise, but efforts to create it in that form in the UK have been feeble in the extreme. Contrast this with Italy's 3,600 local civil protection organisations, or Germany's THW, with 630 bases and more than a million volunteers. Local and regional authorities have been emasculated, and the result of this has been manifest in their inability to respond adequately to local needs. Exactly one hundred years of research on communication in disasters has been ignored, and the result has been confusion and a terrible loss of trust in authority, destroying the pact that is needed in order to create the sort of national consensus that will make the reduction of infection a truly national enterprise. The UK Government's 13 policy U-turns do not reflect adaptation to dynamic circumstances, but inability to conceive what to do, how to implement it and how to communicate.

Currently, there is no sign whatsoever that there will be a change for the better. Emergency management is still languishing in the doldrums in the United Kingdom. A modern system is needed, integrated at all levels, driven from below, harmonised from above, not authoritarian, but facilitative and participatory. It has been widely stated that democracy is under threat in the UK, as power is becoming excessively centralised. Civil protection, when it works, is a form of participatory democracy, in which the citizen has an active stake in his or her own safety and security. It also requires participation across the spectrum of agegroups, ethnicities, genders, educational levels, orientations, and so on. Clarity, trust, welfare, care and equity are needed, now.

References

Alexander, D.E. 2020a. Failing to plan, planning to fail. IAI News, Institute of Art and Ideas, London, https://iai.tv/articles/failing-to-plan-planning-to-fail-auid-1551

Alexander, D.E. 2020b. Britain is in a state of emergency. So where are its emergency planners? The Guardian, 5 May 2020.

Murphy, S., K. Proctor and J. Murray 2020. From face masks to Covid testing: 11 times the UK government has U-turned. The Guardian, 25 August 2020 - and subsequent updates.

PHE 2017. Exercise Cygnus Report. Tier One Command Post Exercise. Pandemic Influenza 18-to 20 October 2016. Public Health England, London, 57 pp.

Interpreting Covid-19 as a Disaster

Image: US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

In terms of its scope, Covid-19 is like no other disaster that has occurred in the last 100 years, since, in fact, the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed more people than both world wars combined, and contributed to the end of the First World War. Despite this, the 2020 pandemic has obvious similarities with previous outbreaks of viral diseases and with many other kinds of disaster.

Distribution of vulnerability. Plenty of evidence exists to show that disasters have a disproportionate impact upon poor and vulnerable people. Covid-19 is no different in this respect. 'Front-line' workers include those who serve in hospitals, work in care homes, run public transport and deliver essential items. Many are poorly paid and few have had a choice about whether to come to work of stay at home. Suddenly it is clear that their work is essential to the running of society. They are the 'human infrastructure' on which we all depend. Paradoxically, this has not particularly strengthened the position of so-called 'key workers' in the hierarchy of labour or enabled them to negotiate better pay and conditions. Their increased exposure to infection has taken a considerable toll in terms of morbidity and mortality.

The role of emergency planning. The scenario for a major pandemic was developed over the period 2003-2009 and was first incorporated into emergency plans close to the start of this period. It followed the beginnings of a revival of interest among historians of disease and medicine in the (misnamed) 1918 'Spanish influenza' pandemic, which began at the end of the 1990s. By 2008, the scenario was more or less complete, with the exception of the recovery phase, which has remained difficult to predict ever since (recovery from the 1918-1920 pandemic took about five years, but it included recovery from the First World War and it led into the Great Depression of 1929).

Since the start of Covid-19 we have seen the failure of emergency planning, which is an indication of failure to provide foresight. Improvisation is permissible only where it is a necessary form of adaptation to those circumstances that genuinely could not have been foreseen in advance and which constitute the unique part of a disaster. Instead in many countries there has been frantic and often unsuccessful improvisation and a little basic analysis easily reveals that it could have been avoided by good planning. It remains unclear whether this lesson will be learned. Will we see the renaissance of emergency planning, and its widespread acceptance as a discipline to be taught and practised, or will we return to haphazard ways of confronting disaster? The failure of emergency planning is perhaps the greatest error made in the management of the Covid-19 disaster.

Failure to make proper use of emergency planning has thrust both politicians and medical scientists into the role of emergency planners. In some countries we may add the military authorities as well. This makes a mockery of decades of patient and progressive demilitarisation of emergency planning. Meanwhile, the scientists are manifestly ill-equipped to take on the role of emergency planners. Their position is further undermined by the difficulties of understanding the disease and its behaviour both as a medical phenomenon and as something that disseminates itself according to social behaviour.

In emergency planning terms, many of the medical and epidemiological questions reduce to a simple 'yes' or 'no'. If neither answer can be confidently made, then the emergency managers simply have to do without a response. The difficulties begin with the logistics of managing the disease, for example, with the challenge of sourcing, acquiring and distributing personal protective equipment and antibody tests. Exigencies like this that are not conditioned by the scientific evidence derived from monitoring, analysing and publishing on the day-to-day progress of the disease. They relate to matters that can and should be sorted out years in advance.

Welfare and social discipline. We live in an age that is increasingly dominated by individualism and the concept of entitlement. It has been evident for decades now that these two traits are unsustainable. Covid-19 has taught the world an enormously important lesson about how to manage a crisis. Before the event, welfare was in decline, social relations were fractious in many places, and solidarity was under threat by exploitative forms of economics and hegemony. That is still perfectly true, but a geat lesson has emerged. Those countries that have weathered Covid-19 best have better welfare systems, more capable and responsive leaders, and populations that understand the primacy of social relations over individualism during times of existential crisis. Under duress, democracy means commonwealth rather than entitlement. The freedom of necessity tells us to sacrifice individual liberties in favour of collective protection. In this process, government shall not usurp its position as the servant of the people but must respond to the collective need, and people must support it.

This, of course, is a counsel of perfection under the conditions that prevail in the modern world. Identity politics should be subsumed by collective solidarity: instead it is reinforced as people retreat into their factions. The neuroses created by the things we have to do in order to survive the disease, in particular suffer lockdown and closure of productive activities, feeds discontent and protest. The leaders of some of the world's largest countries have consistently shown an inability to make rational, consistent and intelligent decisions about Covid-19. A close analysis of the data would no doubt be able to connect their decisions to preventable death tolls.

Democracy in action (or not). Disasters are participatory events. If people do not want to participate in the response to them, circumstances will usually force them to do so. Covid-19 has been the litmus test of democratic deficit. In each country, the intelligence and responsiveness of leadership and the comprehension and responsiveness of the people have defined the progress of the crisis. Risk management is suddenly revealed to be an imperative, a daily task and the responsibility of everyone. Those who opt out of it undermine the response to the crisis.

Sadly, another casualty of Covid-19 has been international relations. The emergency has been managed resolutely at the national level, irrespective of whether that is the right or wrong geographical scale at which to tackle it. At more local scales, we see blanket measures applied to regions with widely varying needs generated by the progress of the disease. Alternatively, we see how intelligent decentralisation improves that picture, but we also see the tremendous challenges of harmonising responses across regions, and we will increasingly see the difficulties of managing interregional transfers. Internationally, the greatest lesson of the previous SARS pandemic (2002-2004) was that international cooperation was the key to reducing its impact. Instead, Covid-19 has had negative impacts on some aspects of international exchange. While scientists have worked without boundaries to understand the disease and provide remedies, politicians have retreated into unilateralism, to the detriment of the very organisations that are best placed to provide the international coordination, such as the World Health Organisation.

Existential threats. It is evident that the world faces challenges at a different order of magnitude to many previous risks. Climate change is at the root of some of them. Covid-19 has shown that a new form of organisation is needed to tackle such risks. To be ready for existential threats, the world needs foresight, planning, welfare, greater equity, better governance, cooperation, decentralisation but internationalism, and better democracy of both the participatory and representative kinds.

In conclusion, Covid-19 is both unlike other disasters and so like them as to be an amalgam of many of their characteristics. As a result, it provides strong lessons for the management of all disasters, large and small. It also provides a warning about what is to come. Will climate change reach a critical juncture first, or will their be an influenza pandemic before that happens...?

Further reading

Alexander, D.E. 2020. Building Emergency Planning Scenarios for Viral Pandemics. UCL-IRDR Covid-19 Observatory. IRDR Report 2020-01. Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London, London, 53 pp. Downloadable from
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/risk-disaster-reduction/news/2020/may/emergency-planning-scenarios-viral-pandemics-new-irdr-working-paper-published

Alexander, D.E. 2020. Failing to plan, planning to fail. IAI News. Institute of Arts and Ideas, London, 5 pp. Downloadable from
https://iai.tv/articles/failing-to-plan-planning-to-fail-auid-1551

More on the Covid-19 Academic Gold Rush

A few days ago, I was accused of "putting the careers of trainees and junior faculty at risk" because a member of my editorial team was slow to complete the review process on a paper that had been submitted to the journal I manage. This reminded me that perhaps 70 per cent of academic publishing is for personnel reasons (to get a job, keep a job, obtain a salary raise, or achieve promotion). I cleave to the old-fashioned view that publishing should take place to further the sharing of good ideas. Nevertheless, I cannot ignore the breakneck speed with which papers are propelled into [digital] print nowadays.

In this context, I salute the thoughtful work of Christopher Gomez, Dierdre Hart and JC Gaillard (Gomez and Hart 2013, Gaillard and Gomez 2015) on the phenomenon of the "disaster gold rush". When a major disaster occurs there is an almost reckless desire to be first in print. This also exists outside the academic field. Indeed, someone ought to do a study of the "book of the disaster" and see who gets the award for the earliest "instant book" to commemorate the damage, destruction and casualties. Gomez and his colleagues drew attention to the worst traits of the "gold rush", namely potential abandonment of ethics and rationality in pursuit of a first-past-the-post research gain.

The Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Release (GEJET), as it has come to be known, produced at least 2,000 papers, and a variety of books, during the first three years of its aftermath. This is probably a substantial underestimate. Thereafter, more and more continued to appear. Currently, as an editor I am dealing, nine years after the event, with two or three new submissions on this disaster. However, the GEJET publication surge is beginning to pale into insignificance next to the Covid-19 gold rush. We confront a new phenomenon: intra-disaster research publication.

Between 1st January and 3rd April 2020, 6,659 papers on Covid-19 were published. Some 83% were in peer reviewed journals and 17% (1,135) came out as unreviewed pre-prints. According to a leading researcher (Erica Bickerton), "keeping on top of which preprints ... are relevant and have robust methodologies is one of the key challenges emerging from the scientific response to Covid-19" (Baker 2020). It is of note that many of the articles were in fields other than medicine, genetics and epidemiology, such as sociology, psychology, jurisprudence and international relations. In short, papers on Covid-19 are coming out at the rate of 67 a day. It is highly probably that the flow will amply exceed 100 a day once research really gets into gear. It is predicted that, in the short term, the proportion of pre-prints will rise.

Much of the research that appears will be repetitive, short on insight, premature and lacking in rigour and scientific testability. Hence, these are some good criteria for presenting Covid-19 research to a potential readership.

Rigour. Does the research conform to the standard tenets of the scientific method: reproducibility, verification, completeness?

Novelty. Will the paper add anything to the debate on Covid-19, or our knowledge of the disaster, that is not already known and present in some of the many other articles that are available?

Utility. Will anyone read the paper? Will the benefit from it in any way? How can a potential readership be convinced to read the paper rather than the other 66 that came out on the same day?

Transformation. Is there any way of measuring or monitoring the take-up of ideas that come from this paper?

There is still much value in papers that have no "pathway to impact". Moreover, it may be that the real impact of a piece of research is not being measured, because to do so is difficult or impossible. In that case, there needs to be another kind of justification for publishing the paper.

As the university world undergoes a radical metamorphosis and transfers its activity to remote working and distance learning, we are all asked to "do more" to achieve this seismic shift. One of the greatest failings of the modern university is its utter lack of appreciation that time is not an elastic commodity. If we are asked to do more, it must be at the expense of some other activity. Paradoxically, "doing more" reduces our productivity, because it forces us to do less important–but more urgent–tasks in place of those that produce a more enduring, positive legacy. The compensatory mechanism involves providing evidence of productivity by going hell-bent for the "quick fix". The most absolute casualty is the time to read and bring oneself up to date with the latest developments.

Major disasters usually lead to a substantial increase in information flow. Covid-19 may be different because information may well become available to a geater order of magnitude than ever before.

It is obvious that much of what is written will be read by practically no one beyond the authors and perhaps a couple of referees. What use is it then? One should bear in mind that in older neglected literature there may be nuggets of gold that escaped the rush, if we only care to go back and look for them. But beyond that, the only valid survival technique is to try, perhaps vainly, to learn how to be ultra-selective on what one does read.

References

Baker, Simon, 2020. Huge Covid-19 output prompting ‘sea change’ in access to research. Times Higher Education, April 9, 2020.

Gomez, C. and D.E Hart 2013. Disaster gold rushes, sophisms and academic neocolonialism: comments on ‘Earthquake disasters and resilience in the global North’. Geographical Journal 179(3): 272-277.

Gaillard, J-C. and C. Gomez 2015. Post-disaster research: is there gold worth the rush?  Jámbà: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies 7(1): 1-6.

Covid-19 and the Disaster Research Gold Rush

As I write, the Covid-19 pandemic is ramping up in many countries. So is the response by academic authors. In 2015 Gaillard and Gomez published an interesting paper on the "disaster research gold rush". It was inspired by some thoughts expressed in 1967 by eminent sociologists of disaster on problems associated with researching transient events (Dynes et al. 1967). In the life-cycle of a disaster, when is it appropriate to do such research?

Disasters give rise to many imperatives. They also generate 'perishable' data that, if they are not collected, will disappear without trace. By common consent, disaster researchers rarely go to events in the early stage of the crisis. To interrupt vital life-saving efforts with social surveys or demands for data would be unconscionable. However, it is a different matter if the researcher can work without visiting the site, putting a foot in the door of the emergency room or stumbling across the path of rescuers.

I am the editor-in-chief of a large international academic journal. The Covid-19 gold rush has already begun. The trickle of papers threatens to turn into a raging torrent, and the disaster is not yet half way through the crisis phase. This points to a conflict. On the positive side, academics wish to throw light on the problems caused by Covid-19, suggest solutions and launch valuable new initiatives. They also wish to capture experience and preserve it as evidence on which to base future policies and plans. On the negative side, there seems to be an urge to be the first in the field with a paper, as if this were are race to be won.

Authors can write in haste and repent at their leisure: editors can rue the day. Much of what is written will need to be reconsidered in the light of the outcome of the pandemic, which is months away, and the post-event debate that follows it. I admit that this is equally true of the present blog, but my criticism is not aimed at those who express an opinion. Debate is healthy, even when there is a need for national and international solidarity. However, any analysis based on half the story is likely to be suspect.

A positive side of the urge to publish is the desire to contribute to the debate before it lapses because attention is diverted to other issues. However, there is a prevailing question about how soon in the sequence of a disaster is it appropriate to take stock? This depends on how easy it is for earlier conclusions to be invalidated by the progress of events. The question is then, to what extent is this predictable or likely to create exigencies that cannot be included in the present analysis?

The Covid-19 pandemic is distinguished by high levels of uncertainty in many of the tenets that anchor the scenario: infection rates, geographical spread, case-fatality rates, government policies and their impacts, public discipline or indiscipline in the face of emergency measures, and repercussions on the economy and people's livelihoods. These factors militate against an over-hasty academic response. So when you read academic papers written in the thick of Covid-19, caveat lector!

References

Dynes, R.R., J.E. Haas and E.L. Quarantelli 1967. Administrative, methodological, and theoretical problems of disaster research. Indian Sociological Bulletin 4: 215-227.

Gaillard, J-C. and C. Gomez 2015. Post-disaster research: is there gold worth the rush? Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies 7(1), Article no. 120, 1-6.

Interpreting the Pandemic for Decision Making and Action

As the Covid-19 pandemic progresses, causing distributed crises in one country after another, it is like watching all I have taught about for the last four decades flash past in a sort of speeded-up film.

In disasters of this kind, three attitudes are common. Normalcy bias, the tendency to accept the most reassuring interpretation of a situation, tells people that it will not be as bad as it seems. The syndrome of personal invulnerability tells them that the worst can only happen to other people. This leads to cognitive dissonance, simultaneous belief in two incompatible ideas. All of these are misleading states of mind, perhaps dangerously so, and especially when found in politicians and decision makers. Other states of mind combine with the three syndromes to worsen the environment of reaction to the crisis.

For a century, the Hollywood model of disaster has been widely disseminated in disaster movies. The underlying precept of this is that beneath the civilised veneer of society pervasive anarchy lurks, which in cases of extreme disruption would bring out the "savage" in ordinary people, a tendency to safeguard their own interests by all conceivable means, including extreme violence. The Hollywood model relies on heroes and villains. In disaster movies the villains either have rapacious ulterior motives connected with power and greed, or they are immune to common sense. The hero (almost always a man, not a woman, who is invariably his loyal supporter) is a young, fit, active, misunderstood visionary, the only person who can see the truth and is prepared to fight for it. Against all odds, he wins. What nonsense! In reality, fighting disasters is a collective effort that places complete reliance of developing enough consensus for measures to work. It demands meticulous prior planning and the development of detailed scenarios before the phenomenon strikes. While anti-social behaviour does not disappear, especially where it is ingrained in society, there is often an upwelling of social participation, which the sociologists know as the therapeutic community.

For Covid-19 we had the scenarios. I have taught them at least once a year for more than a decade. My primary message was that a pandemic is as much a socio-economic and behavioural problem as a medical and epidemiological one. There was nothing visionary about my approach. It was based on material that has been well publicised and freely available since the second half of the first decade of the century. Normalcy bias, fiscal stringency and the ideology of profit conspired to stop preparations from being effective. Dire warnings were given by emergency planners and epidemiologists. There were ignored or underrated, largely because dire warnings tend to be discounted. They do not encourage decision makers to assume responsibility.

What is now fascinating about the consequences of this is that improvisation is being used frantically to cover the yawning gaps in preparedness. Improvisation cannot be totally avoided in disaster, but failure to prepare leads to avoidable deaths and suffering. Hospital beds, medical staff, personal protective equipment, ventilators, vaccines, antivirals, palliative medicines, economic subsidies, payment for holidays, substitute wages, organised assistance, the policing of social distancing, the reorganisation of public transport and basic services, emergency communication, they are all being improvised. It is rather too much and hence the task is simply overwhelming.

For many people, the Hollywood interpretation, familiar as it is, was the only model they had recourse to in order to understand the workings of this disaster. It rapidly proved unserviceable and has been abandoned by many, thank goodness. However, it has been followed by catastrophism. We might see this interpretation as one of the "orderly breakdown" of society, in contrast to the anarchic version propounded by Hollywood. Inasmuch as there is a model, it is the 1920s, a dire period that led, through mass unemployment, general strikes and failure to care for demobilised servicemen, to the Great Crash of 1929, and ultimately the Second World War. Perhaps the overriding question is "after Covid-19 has finally abated, to what extent will the world be the same as it was?" There is little sense that it will be a better, stronger, more prosperous place.

A related question concerns whether the lessons of this pandemic will be learned. The indications are, at best, mixed. There is often a tendency to assume, once a disaster has passed and recovery is well underway, that it is "all over", an episode that will not be repeated. One of the greatest lessons is the imperative need to take emergency planning and preparedness more seriously. I hope that this will be received in full, resources will be supplied and major effort will be expended, but I am not going to bet on it.

In previous posts, I have suggested that disasters need to be understood with more emphasis on their context. I suggested the "egg model", in which the yolk is a set of causal factors directly related to disasters and the white is all the factors that impinge on the yolk without being direct causes of disaster. In another model, general vulnerability encapsulates specific vulnerability to disasters. We will need to look long and hard at the context of future susceptibility to disasters and chart the interaction in a world that will inevitably bear the marks of this major upheaval. Until some form of stability is reached, progress on this important task is likely to be very restricted.

Covid-19: An Address

Once upon a time in Tuscany, when my son was very young, I lamented to a friend that all he seemed to have learned at school was how to swear and blaspheme. My friend put on a wise expression and said, very sagely, "David, you must remember that swearing and blaspheming are an ancient tradition in our countryside here." I mention this because, in AD 1244, a group of men in a bothy decided that they were swearing and blaspheming too much and each time they did it they would put a groat in a jar. At the end of the year they would open up the container and spend the proceeds on a feast. As it happened, when they came to open the jar there was so much money in it that they hadn't got the nerve to spend it on food and drink for themselves. So they founded a rescue and care society. Thus was born the Venerable Company of the Misericordia. After 776 years it is still headquartered in the same building, situated next to the cathedral in central Florence. In the small Tuscan town in which I live, the Misericordia did not arrive for a further 291 years (in 1535, precisely), but what are a few centuries between friends?

An organisation of this kind obviously has very deep roots. And there is great pride in it. Moreover, it started a process of creating associations that proliferated to the point that volunteer organisations are the backbone of the Italian civil protection system and there are 3,600 of them. They connect the world of emergencies with the general population. In the last four earthquakes in thed affected areas there were more rescuers than population, which is a remarkable achievement, especially as they are trained, organised and equipped. Most importantly, they are a full part of the system.

In times of grave crisis, we need solidarity, but where are we going to get it? The Covid-19 pandemic ought to teach us the importance of both preparedness and social participation. With regard to preparedness, emergency response consists of planned activities, standardised procedures and improvisation. Too much of the last of these is tantamount to negligence, because it shows up the lack of planning and preparedness. Social participation is about the democratisation of emergency response. Civil protection is us–all of us. It works best where people are protagonists and assume some responsibility for their own destinies. Participatory civil protection is prudent. It draws in the beneficiaries of the system as actors and protagonists, but it, too, needs to be organised in advance, with foresight.

Different countries have different attitudes to emergency preparedness and the protection of the general public. These stem from their administrative and legal systems and cultures, and from the attitude of the holders of power to direct democracy. Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar and killed 136,000 of its citizens, in part because they had no role in creating resilience against such an event.

In Britain, there is a culture of "leave it to the experts", or perhaps, given the anti-intellectual wind blowing through the country, disdain for experts (a paradox, indeed). Since the stand-on-your-own-two-feet privations of the Second World War, there has been a gradual and sustained retreat from personal respomsability in favour of leaving the work to officialdom–and blaming officialdom when there are shortcomings in its response. There has also been the ideological assault of Thatcherism, a retreat from social provision and a gradual abandonment of the idea of participatory democracy. "There is no such thing as society," she said, and did her best to make it a self-fufilling prophecy. At the same time, control of the country's assets became ever more centralised.

Britain does not lack a social conscience, or sensitivity to social issues. Many people labour ceaselessly to provide what the state has increasingly turned away from. When there is a major crisis, the response is generally to revive what sociologists call the 'therapeutic community'. But it has been weakened. Britain follows, not the continental European model of solidarity, but the American model of individualism, and this is particularly true in civil protection. It is a pity, as the United States have lost the lead in this field–if they ever had it. The coup de grâce was the response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. It was a model of inefficiency and failure.

Commentators and officials used to say that "Britain does not have disasters". We have instead, "major incidents". Why we should be so reticent about calling them disasters is a mystery to me, for that is what they are. Covid-19 is rather more than a "major incident". It is a gargantuan civil contingency that will leave its mark for decades to come–among those who survive it.

There was a period in the decade of the 2000s and early 2010s in which pandemics were the focus of emergency planners' attention. They were then supplanted by a renewed emphasis on counter-terrorism and that in turn was overlain by frantic preparations for the supply-chain disaster of Brexit (emergency response is very much a "flavour of the month" business, just like ice-cream shops). Looking at the current British response to Covid-19, it is difficult to see quite where all that effort on pandemic emergency planning went. Perhaps the answer is that it is too difficult to plan a system that has been decimated, after eight years of Draconian budget cuts. However, it is not exactly easy to organise an alternative system in the thick of the emergency. Voluntarism comes in three types: spontaneous, organised and organised-and-incorporated. The last of these makes a real civil protection system. The first is inefficient because it is shorn of training and equipment, it is not adequately absorbed into the emergency response machine, and it has to be organised with much effort on the spur of the moment. That is what we are currently seeing in Britain. But at least we are seeing an attempt to generate solidarity, even if it is not of the optimum kind.

Emergency planning is something that needs to be done in times of quiescence and peace, but it also goes on throughout the emergency, as the provisions that were made in advance have to be adapted to the dynamic, evolving situation. Much use is made of scenarios. A scenario is not a prediction of the future. In this context, it is a systematic exploration of a range of possible future outcomes. For pandemics, we use parametric models. These are simply sets of equations in which, on the basis of–often flimsy–assumptions and a minimal amount of data–coefficients are set and calculations are made. Garbage in-garbage out if the sum total of the data and the assumptions are not adequate. And the trouble with pandemics is that there is truly massive uncertainty: disease transmission rates, infectiousness, survival rates, social behaviour, the effect of emergency measures, healthcare response–they are all infinitely mutable.

Under such circumstances, two elements of strategy are to be recommended, neither of which has been properly practised in Britain. One is not to discuss the worst case scenario unless there is a very strong practical reason for doing so. The other is to devote very substantial resources to early preparedness, as a precautionary measure and a demonstration of prudence. "Normalcy bias" makes us assume that it won't be that bad. It might be, so we must be ready to fight it.

Besides Covid-19, the shadow of another phantom stalks us. That is the Hollywood model of emergencies. Research (including my research) shows that it is remarkably resilient, not only among the general public, but also among the emergency response communty and the political classes. In essence, the Hollywood model is one in which a destabilising emergency causes the breakdown of society, revealing the essentially selfish, self-seeking egotism of its members. The antidote is marshall law. There have been rumours about preparations for this in Britain, a country which tends to look upon emergencies as public order problems. If we ever arrive at such a situation it will be a sad, sad indictment of British society. It would presuppose that, by and large, people have no social conscience and that the fabric of society is completely threadbare. As that seems unlikely, I think the model should be dropped like a hot potato. It is as well to remember that outbreaks of looting tend to occur strictly where there are substantial preconditions for them. They do not happen spontaneously in a completely unpredictable manner. Nor do other forms of antisocial behaviour. In this, we reap what we sow.

Disasters need to be seen in the contexts in which they occur--I nearly said the context in which we generate them, for they are not natural. Identity politics, scapegoating, contraction in the welfare safety net and public services, all these impinge, negatively, on the developing disaster scenario. For many people, Covid-19 is a bolt from the blue. It either is or will become a major source of anxiety and destabilisation in their lives. Yet what is happening is predictable and was predicted, comprehensively and repeatedly. The question is who was listening? And who was willing to act? There is now a major opportunity to rethink the tenets of modern life and refound them on the basis of prudence, solidarity and participation. And let us not forget that for the inhabitants of Syria, Yemen and all those places where grinding poverty routinely overwhelms people, existential threats have been the normal way of life. The influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed most of its victims in developing countries that entirely lacked health-care systems. That is a sobering lesson. Amartya Sen wrote that health care is a prerequisite of development: never more than now.