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Lucy Easthope, one of the UK’s apical experts successful disaster planning, has advised the UK authorities connected large planetary incidents specified arsenic 9/11, the Grenfell Tower fire, the warfare successful Ukraine and, of course, the Covid pandemic. “If you were a pandemic planner successful 2020, past determination person been fewer surprises implicit the past fewer years,” Easthope says. “In those pandemic plans we wrote a tenable worst-case scenario—and present we get to unrecorded it.”
Emergency planners specified arsenic Easthope cognize that the aftermath of a catastrophe tin usually beryllium divided astir into 3 stages: the honeymoon (“Or, arsenic we telephone it now, lockdown one”), the slump, and the uptick. “We’re inactive successful the slump,” she says, of the UK. “We’ve reached a signifier wherever each signs of organization illness are here. Basic reliance connected the wellness attraction strategy for the astir privileged is present gone. Failure gets talked astir loudly.”
However, Easthope warns that the uptick, the signifier erstwhile societies rebuild, isn’t ever guaranteed. “It’s truly important to person nary contented beryllium disconnected the array and [to support things] nonpolitical,” she says. “To beryllium precise alert that the Titanic tin sink, and to permission the hubris astatine the door.”
Disaster readying research, for instance, shows that the post-pandemic intelligence wellness situation volition proceed for the adjacent 30 to 40 years, with an accrued prevalence of intoxicant and cause maltreatment successful affected communities. “Recovery aft these sorts of events is not a spring, but the worst benignant of endurance,” Easthope says. “The lone bully happening that comes retired of a catastrophe similar a pandemic is that it creates 1 azygous accidental to reexamine structures and institutions.”
This nonfiction appears successful the July/August 2024 contented of WIRED UK magazine.
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