Tiger GPS: Government and Public Service Blog

How do you know you’re making the right decisions when you’re dealing with something no one in the last 100 years has ever had to deal with? At the federal level, the response to COVID-19 has been reactionary and there’s a lot of woulda, coulda, shoulda going on right now from the public. Reports have stated that employees of the pandemic branch of the CDC abruptly resigned in 2018. Their positions were never refilled. With no specific group to handle the situation, President Trump appointed a task force in January to develop a U.S. response to the potential crisis. In February, the president named Vice President Mike Pence to head the group, which has since been providing regular updates to the public on policy decisions and other actions regarding the outbreak.

How do we know what would have worked? A lock down on all out of the country travel right from the start? A mandatory 15 day lockdown? I can’t even imagine our country succeeding at a stay-at-home ordinance. Some of us have to go to work. We have friends who are working in hospitals who could possibly bring the virus home to their loved ones who in turn could take it to work at their City Hall. We’re still going to grocery stores for essential needs and getting gas to get to where we need to go. How do we really know where we got the virus in the first place?  We know the first confirmed reported case was identified in China in December 2019. The first confirmed case outside China was reported on January 20, 2020, in Japan, Thailand, and South Korea. The first case in the United States was identified in Washington state on January 21. But these are all confirmed reported cases. We don’t know if the U.S. had a case before January 21. Is it possible? Yes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) started to push basic precautions such as hand-washing and cleaning frequently touched surfaces. On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a pandemic. It seems like social distancing is widely seen as the best available means to “flatten the curve” of the pandemic, a phrase that epidemiologists use to describe slowing down the spread of infection. This approach can save lives by keeping local health care systems from being overwhelmed.

I believe South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster is doing the best he can at responding to COVID-19. He’s doing everything he can to keep groups from forming while avoiding a mandatory stay-at-home ordinance. I was a bartender for years and I feel for the servers out there who are out of a job right now, but the decision to close restaurants was the most obvious one since that’s the business where germs are spread the most. I’m not a parent and I don’t have much knowledge about working with kids but closing the schools made sense in protecting kids and their families. With schools, restaurants, and businesses closed, the only thing to really do when the weather is nice is to go to the pool or the beach. I believe the governor had no choice but to close our beaches and boat landings because that’s where law enforcement saw the most people over the weekend. It was busy everywhere and people definitely were not social distancing.

At the local level, it looks like municipalities are doing their best to continue operations. I’m grateful to have a job that allows me to work from anywhere and I’m grateful that I was able to pay my rent today. But there’s a lot of people who can’t say the same right now. We were on an economic high just over a month ago. I hope we’re able to get back to where we were and maybe even better.

Over the last 100 years the United States public education system has changed to fit the needs of the citizens. One of the most recent changes which I personally feel will create new policies is how education has been mandated to give as well as receive: online. While homeschooling is not a new concept, it is in the minority of chosen education formats. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not an option, but a necessity. Every school across the nation has been forced to close. Every school across the nation has sent their teachers and professors home to do something that many of them have never done before, provide online instruction. In higher education, while there are still more in-seat students than not, this is not a new concept. For those children in Kindergarten, however, this is a fast changing whole new world. Where small children were just beginning to make new friendships at the start of the year, learning new social cues, and what exactly is the color red, the lives of millions of children all of the America have been changed and possibly forever. It is my belief that because of this abrupt necessary change with children of all ages now receiving their education online, that new policies will put in place to allow for this continued format for those that choose it. Parents, students, and the educators have all answered the call to continue work as usual from the comforts of their own homes while protecting each other from further spread of COVID-19. The grading is another story.

News outlets and papers everywhere are reporting that in higher education the call to give either a pass or fail is necessary. Students have even demanded it. Universities and colleges have begun to concede. For elementary, middle and high school the path is not so clear. Schools are sending students to already established online public schools. But, whether they can receive credit for the work is still uncertain. The need for data is clear, but how soon can the data provide a clear picture to help educators map out the next steps? With COVID-19 death tolls rising, no one is even clear if the brick and mortar schools will even be able to open back up next fall. However, even if schools stay closed longer than anticipated, we may find that parents have to go to work before children do, but how can they? I think this will also bring a wave of changes where we may have to look at providing financial welfare benefits to parents that stay home much like what is done in the Netherlands (please note that my source is my “sister” who is from the Netherlands and lives in Rotterdam – she has told me about something that could be called a child benefit – welfare).

It is my belief that many things in our nation will change as result of COVID-19, the most obvious being education, welfare reform, and healthcare. For these changes to not only take place with a permanent option, so must policies be amended and or created.

Thinking about COVID-19 and the response the US as a whole has taken, I think politics have played too important a part.  Decisions should be based on the best evidence presented and not on “will this get me elected or re-elected?”  But we see this kind of response from the local levels all the way up.  Each town, locale and even university has to think of the bottom dollar and how this will impact the long term.  Working in the Emergency Operations Center for Clemson University has given me some insight that perhaps others will never see.  The due diligence with each and every decision regarding teaching and the students is exhausting.  No decision is made lightly.

Clemson University has taken extraordinary steps to account for and, help if possible, every student enrolled and all the employees associated with CU. The details that have been taken care of are incredible. I say employees associated because CU is worried about their contractor and outside entities as much as those they directly employ. The care and time spent making sure the messaging is right and available down to how we will feed those students who are left on campus, the process is daunting.

The collaboration and cooperation I have seen over the last month is really what Clemson is about.  Different groups, different responsibilities, completely different mindsets all came together to get the job done and it is still ongoing. The question lingering now is how long this will go on.  Events and activities are being cancelled or re-imagined through the summer.  Will this continue into the fall?  We don’t know right now, but if it does, Clemson will be ready.  Every contingency has been thought of and batted around for solutions.

I do wish the governors of all the states could come to an agreement to work together. I don’t think it does a lot of good to close one state and others are spreading the disease in a neighboring state, perhaps China did it best, closed everything! The US is slowly catching on that it’s real and we have to deal with it. I hope we do.

As I reflect on COVID-19 global pandemic my mind is drawn to the fact that so much has changed in so very little time. The U.S. saw its very first cases of coronavirus on January 21^st in Washington State. President Trump responds the following day via Twitter that we have everything under control. The White House Coronavirus Response Task Force was established one week later; we continue to have everything under control (or so we are told). Our first travel bans are issued for China the day after the task force was established. Fast forward five weeks to the first case in California on February 26^th of an individual with no known history of travel. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate this is a sign of community spread. President Trump announces the same day that the U.S. is really prepared, citing former President Obama as incompetent with respect to establishing a system that would handle a pandemic however President Trump fired our pandemic response team in 2018. We are where we are because of decisions that have been made.

It was not until March 11^th that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Two days later, President Trump declared a national emergency in support of responding to the growing numbers of U.S. cases. On March 17^th, President Trump under the advisement from the CDC and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), requests that everyone works from home for 14 days and limits social gatherings to no more than 10 people. The U.S. Senate unveiled an economic stimulus package of $1+ trillion two days later and on March 27^th President Trump signed a $2.2 trillion emergency spending bill. Up until this point, President Trump had been hopeful to remove the stay-at-home guidance by Easter. On March 29^th, however, he extended this period to the end of April. Today, we’re over 1 million cases in the world, with the U.S. exceeding 245,000 confirmed cases and more than 6,000 deaths, or over a 2.4% death rate.

Clemson’s Emergency Operations Center activated in the Watt Family Innovation Center, where I work, the afternoon of February 29^th. We’ve remained in an activated state for the past 34 days. As I reflect on the challenges we’ve been through over the last month, I’m really impressed with our University response to COVID-19. We have and continue to make data-informed decisions. We first started with the recall of all of students abroad. As cases began to grow in the U.S., we shifted focus to going online after Spring Break in an effort to extend the time away from campus to prevent our local medical resources from becoming overwhelmed. What other institutions of higher education (IHEs) were doing for their semesters was, and still is, a critical contributor to Clemson’s decision-making process. It is really fun to share that along with another Watt colleague, she and I led IHE data collection for the university with significant focus on the decisions all the ACC and SEC schools were making. We have watched every single White House and SC Governor press conference for the past 34 days. I’ve also been tracking the growth in active cases, deaths, and recovered for the entire U.S. and reporting it in 24-hour and 7-day week trends. These daily data reports are included in the situational report (sitrep) that is distributed to those working on emergency operations and key leadership personnel every weekday. Our actions have always been based on what we think is the next right move to make that reduces risk for the Clemson community. I except that the work is far from over, but I’m so humbled to play a role on a fantastic team leading the University through unprecedented times.