When emergencies and disasters collide: Lessons from the response to the Magna, Utah earthquake during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The following article addresses the complexities of responding to the Magna, Utah earthquake under conditions of the global corona virus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. The article begins with a brief mention of the literature on complex disasters along with the research methods employed for the study. Contextual information about COVID-19 and the Magna earthquake are then provided along with general issues that had to be addressed in the public health emergency and after the seismic hazard occurred. The following two sections identify how COVID-19 benefited the response to the earthquake as well as how the virus complicated operations after the tremor. The article then discusses major lessons of this research and provides recommendations for future study and practice. Overall, this research reveals that the responses to these two simultaneous events witnessed successes as well as significant challenges. The appearance of COVID-19 may have limited injuries or the loss of life during the Magna earthquake, and it also enabled an early activation of the emergency operations center (EOC). However, COVID-19 presented unique challenges for evacuation, sheltering, and damage assessment functions. The pandemic also altered the nature of EOC operations, created the need for a virtual response, and had distinct implications for financial accounting and personnel workload.

Six Cs of pandemic emergency management: A case study of Taiwan's initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A review of the disaster literature indicates that emergency responses to pandemics are often understudied; the current COVID-19 crisis provides an important opportunity to improve awareness and understanding about this and other contagious and disruptive diseases. With this in mind, this study examines Taiwan's response to COVID-19 because it was successful in spite of a high probability of contagion. The paper first explores the assertion that cognition, communication, collaboration, and control are vital for effective disaster response; it then indicates the need to consider two additional Cs: confidence (trust of government's competency) and coproduction (public participation in disaster transmission prevention). The paper also conducts a qualitative descriptive study of the Taiwan government's response timeline with examples of each of these concepts in action. To further illustrate the need for the two additional Cs, survey data illustrate how public confidence serves as a pivot between government's COVID-19 response and citizen coproduction in COVID-19 transmission prevention.