European disaster management in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
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European disaster management in response to the COVID‑19 pandemic Christian Wankmüller1 Received: 2 July 2020 / Accepted: 3 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Top priority of governments in containing the COVID-19 pandemic is “flattening the curve” which implies a slowing down of the virus’ spread across the entire population. The situation which European policymakers are facing at the moment is completely new and only few of them have the required experience to handle a disaster of such magnitude. What is important now is to avoid problems that repeatedly occurred in past disaster responses by learning the lessons and acting accordingly. This paper reflects on European disaster management in containing the spread of COVID-19 and uncovers response inefficiencies that are still present. Keywords COVID-19 · Coronavirus · European disaster management · Disaster preparedness · Immediate response
1 Introduction Disasters of recent years have caused thousands of victims and long-term ecological, social and economic damage to the affected areas. The Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, the Horn of Africa malnutrition crisis in 2011 and the Nepal Earthquake in 2015 are examples of devastating disasters, which put the resilience of society to the test. Since December 2019, the world population is once again facing a disaster of unexpected magnitude caused by a newly discovered coronavirus (SARS-CoV2). This virus leads to a severe acute respiratory infection (COVID-19), comparable to pneumonia, characterized by fever, cough and shortness of breath (Liu et al. 2020). This virus is remarkably dangerous, due to its ease of person-to-person transmission even by infected individuals who do not have any perceivable symptoms (Bai et al. 2020). This novel virus first attracted increased international attention in December 2019, when the Chinese government announced the first cases of infection in * Christian Wankmüller [email protected] 1
Department of Operations, Energy, and Environmental Management, Universitaet Klagenfurt, Universitätsstraße 65 ‑ 67, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria
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Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei, China. Since then, the virus has spread globally, resulting in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. According to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, a total number of 1,850,966 confirmed cases with 114,290 deaths in 185 countries worldwide had been reported by April 16th 2020 (Johns Hopkins University 2020). It is assumed that the number of unrecorded cases is considerably higher due to inconsistent testing and the nonavailability of testing equipment in certain parts of the world. During the first weeks of the outbreak it quickly turned out that COVID-19 is much more dangerous than the conventional flu and therefore systematic interventions to contain the epidemic are urgently needed. At this point, problems and inefficiencies experienced in recent mega disasters have to be avoided in order to efficiently contain the virus’ spread
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