In this special edition of Alert, we’re showing you the early stages of our global effort to pivot toward partnerships and collaborations with local and national health authorities and other nongovernmental organizations. In some ways, this is how we always work when confronting a major epidemic—whether that’s Ebola or measles. Today, our teams are reaching out to conduct trainings and share best practices on vital infection prevention and control measures, building on some of the work we started in order to combat the growing long-term threat of antibiotic resistance. But the coronavirus emergency challenges us all, worldwide, to find new ways of working individually and collectively to flatten the curve of the epidemic.
In the US, and across Europe, many of our most seasoned aid workers have been grounded because of travel restrictions and precautions to avoid the spread of coronavirus from countries with high rates of transmission. (On March 26, the US became the new epicenter of the outbreak, as the country with the highest number of confirmed cases of COVID-19.) So we’re starting to go local and respond to the needs in our home communities. We urged doctors and nurses in our association to make themselves available to their area hospitals, especially in the overstretched emergency departments. We shared blueprints for field hospitals and patient flow charts; passed along digital training manuals to strengthen infection prevention and control; and disseminated instructions on how to don personal protective equipment. We coached a union representing farm workers, many of them migrants, on how to set up handwashing stations in agricultural fields. We advised managers of homeless shelters on how to safely isolate individuals who have mild symptoms of COVID-19. As this magazine goes to press, we are exploring the possibility of launching limited operations in New York, focusing on supporting infection control measures in facilities serving the homeless and housing insecure.