Type I Teams

[jeffreyi]

I live in a rural, mostly right wing corner of California. I was talking to a friend today about something else, but asked him...his wife is a very capable Type I team member, those are the folks who respond to emergencies within the Incident Command System. They are highly trained and are the ones who handle the biggest wildland fires, the 9/11 events, hurricanes and so on. I asked him if her team was being mobilized. He sort of scoffed and said "no!", as if, you know, why would they be mobilized?. I told him I hope in a month he can tell me that I was full of it, and if he can, I will be very happy. I think I will call my rep right now though and suggest that the Type I team mobilization happen pronto.

[lapfog_1]

1. mobilize to do what, exactly?

I could see it if someone had to brains to declare a quarantine in your area... mobilize them to post guards at every intersection to a) scan for fevers and b) turn everyone around and tell them to go home and STAY THERE.

Mobilize to take food and water and medicine, free of charge, to anyone that wants it.

That is what it will take... That is what the Chinese did. But we don't have the political will power so we talk about washing hands and not going to a sporting event.

Which is fine... good stuff.... but they don't know just how dangerous this virus is.

It lives on glass and metal for 10 days.

It can infect person to person from 14 feet away (documented).

It can hang in the air you breath for 3 hours after an infected person has coughed.

we have no vaccine, no immunity, and no treatment.

and the fatality rate is somewhere between 1% and 3%. We don't really know because we haven't tested everyone that had it.

[jeffreyi]

2. Well, what could they do.

From the FEMA government site:

When are AHIMTs used?
Typical incidents where AHIMTs are used include:

Coordination of on-scene operations.
Natural disasters, e.g., hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, etc.
Planned exercise or public event requiring the cooperation and joint participation of two or more agencies or jurisdictions.
Public health emergency.
Terrorist incidents.
Train derailments, aircraft incidents and other large/complex accidents.

From Wikipedia:
The Incident Command System (ICS) is a standardized approach to the command, control, and coordination of emergency response providing a common hierarchy within which responders from multiple agencies can be effective.[1]

ICS was initially developed to address problems of inter-agency responses to wildfires in California and Arizona but is now a component of the National Incident Management System (NIMS)[2] in the US, where it has evolved into use in All-Hazards situations, ranging from active shootings to HazMat scenes.[3] In addition, ICS has acted as a pattern for similar approaches internationally.

And more:
Incidents are defined within ICS as unplanned situations necessitating a response. Examples of incidents may include:

Emergency medical situations (ambulance service)
Hazardous material spills, releases to the air (toxic chemicals), releases to a drinking water supply
Hostage crises
Man-made disasters such as vehicle crashes, industrial accidents, train derailments, or structure fires
Natural disasters such as wildfires, flooding, earthquake or tornado
Public Health incidents, such as disease outbreaks
Search and Rescue operations
Technological crisis
Terrorist attacks
Traffic incidents

Wikipedia actually has a pretty good overview of the system.

Basically, it came about because of wildfires and every affected agency and entity having their own hierarchy, communication, activities, and priorities. This led to massive cluster doodles of confusion, miscommunication, inefficiency and redundancy, to day nothing of danger. So this system is designed to correct all that, and unify the different entities under a common structure. It's been around since the 1970's, is efficient, and has been adopted by many countries in addition to this one.

I can see where as this tsunami hits all the different entities involved in the health care world have the potential to be operating to an extent in their own bubble, which adds unnecessary complexity.

One application right now for an incident command team would be to tackle the problem of the unavailable testing materials, which is a crisis. I don't know how the CDC handles this but so far it's not encouraging. And then the actual testing. If we ever have the drive-through testing like South Korea, this could be coordinated over large areas by an Incident Management Team, they are set up to handle the logistics, hiring, finances, communications, public outreach, blah blah.

There's no reason to reinvent the wheel and this is a good resource.