Hiding Our Heads in the Sand

By Kim Bellard, April 24, 2020

There are so many stories about the coronavirus pandemic — some inspiring, some tragic, and all-too-many frustrating. In the world’s supposedly most advanced economy, we’ve struggled to produce enough ventilators, tests, even swabs, for heaven’s sake. I can’t stop thinking about infrastructure, especially unemployment systems.

The U.S. is seeing unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression, and occurring in a matter of a couple months, not several years. Many unemployment systems could not manage the flood of applications.

The word that has been repeatedly used to describe unemployment systems is “antiquated.” Many are still mainframe systems based on COBOL, dating as far back as the 1960’s. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy lamented: “We have systems that are 40 years-plus old, and there’ll be lots of postmortems. And one of them on our list will be how did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?”

And, let’s be fair: it’s not just state unemployment systems dependent on COBOL; many key federal systems are as well, including some used by the IRS, HHS, Treasury, and DoD, not to mention many banking systems.

There had been precious little money spent on upgrading the systems to more modern architectures, or even to retaining the programmers who could keep them running. When making budget decisions, it often seems like there will always be time to modernize…until there isn’t. Like in a pandemic.

We’re a nation that tends to underfund public pensions, at the local, state, and federal levels. We’re a nation whose infrastructure — e.g., roads, bridges, railroads, dams, water and sewer systems — is rated D+ by the American Society of Civil Engineers. And, as the COVID-19 pandemic is making so very evident, we’re a nation that has been extremely shortsighted in funding public health.

A new report from the Trust for America’s Health minces no words. President and CEO John Auerbach charges: COVID-19 has shined a harsh spotlight on the country’s lack of preparedness for dealing with threats to Americans’ well-being. Years of cutting funding for public health and emergency preparedness programs has left the nation with a smaller-than-necessary public health workforce, limited testing capacity, an insufficient national stockpile, and archaic disease tracking systems — in summary, twentieth-century tools for dealing with twenty-first-century challenges.

Tom Frieden, formerly of the CDC, warns: “We need an army of contact tracers in every community of the US to be ready to find every contact and warn them to care for themselves and stop spreading it to others.” Unfortunately, as Brian Castrucci of the de Beaumont Foundation told Time: “We waited until the house was on fire before we started interviewing firefighters.”

Oh, now we’re seeing why we need to invest in public health. Now we see why we need to invest in better UI systems. Now we see why things like the federal emergency stockpile and the Defense Production Act are important. It’s not like we didn’t know that pandemics could happen and how devastating they could be; we just chose to not be prepared.

We’ve been hiding our heads in the sand.

We’ll get through this pandemic. Not all of us, and not without too many of the rest us suffering in many ways. We’re told that we’re probably not going back to “normal,” at least not anytime soon, that we’ll have to adjust to a “new normal.” I just hope that the new normal includes a more clear-eyed perspective on being prepared for when pandemics and other catastrophes do strike.

We may never be fully prepared for when emergencies do hit, but we certainly can do better than we’ve done so far with this one.

This post is an abridged version of the original posting in Medium. Please follow Kim on Medium and on Twitter (@kimbbellard)