Because the sheer size of the impact was so large, I think there is a greater sense of despair and loss that people are experiencing. This experience of dramatic, prolonged displacement will create a toll long into the future. |
expressing anger and other most unusual behaviors on what appeared to be a coached, homemade recording. |
I would like to see a new national discussion about what prepared means, how it's measured and what we should expect. Since 9-11, the nation has spent tens of billions of dollars on preparedness, yet we can account for very little and can hardly say what actually has been accomplished. |
I wouldn't be too quick to predict how this is going to turn out, |
If the infrastructure breaks down, ... and officials are saying, `Here's what we need you to do,' but they can't even tell people where their next drink of water is coming from, then there's going to be a complete breakdown in trust, often followed by anger. |
Many people will be stressed and will require support over a long period of time and will be vulnerable to psychological problems. We know this from other disaster experiences. |
The health care system is at least crippled, if not completely out of commission. |
The illusion is that help (from the federal government) will be there minutes later, which is really not the case, |
The lethal capacity of this virus is very, very high, so it's a deadly virus that humans have not been exposed to before. That's a very bad combination. |
The translation of this is martial law in the United States, |
We are profoundly unprepared to manage a pandemic flu threat right now, |
We heard this horrific story today of a woman whose husband died and she sat in the tent for hours because there's nothing you can do with the body ... and just went to tell the coroner, 'I marked it and you can find the body here or there,' |
We started from zero five weeks ago to all this hot, hot spotlight on pandemic flu, but we're not going to be ready. |
We're only missing one more piece before it becomes a pandemic and that is the ability to be transmitted from person to person as opposed to simply from birds or fowl to humans, |
We're playing Russian roulette with public health here. |