With the change of administrations in Washington, it seems like a good time to do some evaluation. This report, released this month, gives an assessment of the operating plans the 50 states (as well as DC and the five U.S. Territories) have put into place in case of pandemic influenza.
While the report breaks out how each state rates in every different assessed area, there are some caveats:
The results of this assessment process provide a broad-brush picture of comparative strengths and weaknesses across the various facets of pandemic preparedness. However, readers should be mindful of two caveats. First, the findings are the product of reviews of documents rather than site visits or other direct observations of performance. The actual degree of readiness for any given State and any given Operating Objective therefore may be better or worse than what the submitted documents portray. Second, preparedness is dynamic rather than static. The actual degree of readiness therefore may have improved or deteriorated between the time any given State submitted its planning information and now.
Makes you thankful that this year has been a “Moderate” one for flu across most of the country. (See the post about Google Flu Trends for an interesting comparison of this year to past ones.) Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands!
