Managing Mass Fatalities during COVID‐19: Lessons for Promoting Community Resilience during Global Pandemics

Abstract

In the United States and around the world, COVID‐19 represents a mass fatality incident, as there are more bodies than can be handled using existing resources. Although the management and disposition of bodies is distressing and heartrending, it is a task that local, state, and federal governments must plan for and respond to collaboratively with the private sector and faith‐based community. When mass fatalities are mismanaged, there are grave emotional and mental health consequences that can delay recovery and undermine community resilience. Using insights from one author's mass fatality management research during the 2010 Haiti earthquake, this Viewpoint essay explores how mass fatalities are being managed in response to COVID‐19. Based on the researcher's findings a decade ago, it is apparent that many lessons have not been learned. The essay concludes by providing governments with practical lessons on how to manage mass fatalities to facilitate and promote community resilience.

Social Vulnerability and Equity: The Disproportionate Impact of COVID‐19

“…What we know about COVID‐19 is that, as a virus, it does not see race, gender, or class, yet it interacts with each of these modifiers in ways that exacerbate the existing oppressive systems that operate to maintain social hierarchy. At a time when New York City is digging mass graves and Michigan communities are scouting ice rinks to store the deceased (Anderson 2020; Dixon 2020; Entress, Tyler, and Sadiq 2020), it feels like a new age, a new day, a new moment. Perhaps the most difficult question is, is the targeting of Black bodies, outside of labor, new in the United States?…”

Fire and fear: Rapid cremations in the Philippines amidst COVID-19

“…There has been a significant uptick of cremation rates and regulations across the globe in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic ( e.g. [ [38] , [39] , [40] , [41] , [42] , [43] , [44] ]), including forced cremations in the Philippines within 12 hours after death. Using disease transmission as grounds for immediate and mandatory cremation is one made from misconception, fear, and speculation rather than one backed by science.…”

Italian University Museums at Time of Covid-19 Lockdown: How to Restore a “Sense of Normalcy”

“…Precisely, the described notion of resilience has assisted social scientists in studying how people and organizations cope with serious external shocks, shedding a light on those organizational features and processes playing a role in responding to external disturbances (Comfort et al, 2010;Linnenluecke & Gri ths, 2010). Hence, it is not surprising that resilience has increasingly inhabited the literature on emergency and disaster management ( Conz & Magnani, 2020;Hu et al, 2014;Noordegraaf & Newman, 2011;Teng-Calleja et al, 2020), including those investigations speci cally concerning the current COVID-19 pandemic as a peculiar instance of external shock (Entress et al, 2020;Jing, 2020).…”