Operation Swine

Yesterday at work I was innocently lingering over my lunch when a new co-worker of mine motioned me over. “Um, what are you doing right now?” she asked.

“Uh…totally important work,is what I’m doing,” I fake eye-rolled at her, finishing off the last of my third cup of tea. She’s new, this co-worker, but she is fast adapting to my ways.

“Okay, but can you come deliver a couple of doses of Tamiflu with me instead?” she asked, and thus went my induction into the heady world of Emergent Public Incidents, or, as we like to call it around my office, Operation Swine.

We’ve got the flu in New Zealand, you see. The type of healthcare work I do now isn’t very hands on anymore, very unlike my last job, so until yesterday I was still only vaguely aware that my organization was even involved in anything flu-related. I mean, I knew we had a type of situation room downstairs as of Monday, but I never go downstairs unless it’s for office supplies, so I didn’t realize until yesterday that things were ramping up and all (very well scrubbed) hands were needed on deck.

We got the meds and some facemasks from downstairs and Googlemapped our destinations and headed out into the spitty rain, happy to be out of the office and curious to see what making these deliveries would be like. We had a whole protocol to follow: roll up at the house, call the person and tell her we were there, drop the packet at the door (which the person was not supposed answer), back up a couple of metres, call the person again, “sight” her physically picking it up, and then write down the date and time of the drop. One person opened the door by mistake when I got there and I leapt back—the person was all “I have a mask! I have a mask on too!”—and slid the meds across to him as if they were a suitcase full of hundys across a deserted parking lot floor at midnight, but that’s about as exciting as it got in terms of threat of contagion.

When we got back to work there were all these emails and voicemails about how my name, unbeknownst to me, had been put forward to join Operation Swine, so this morning I had to be in bright and early for a briefing. I felt vaguely excited, to be part of a briefing. It sounds so official. Turns out that Downstairs was a full-on hive of activity, girl, and I had plenty of time to watch everyone hurry around in this very intensely busy and focused way, with occasional stops for gigantic trays of carrot cake.

I never realized how much invisible infrastructure goes into something like this—I mean when was the last time you thought about coordinated pandemic response? There’s all this stuff that has to happen, very quickly: tracking exposed people, tracking everyone those exposed people have come into contact with, keeping in touch with the Ministry of Health. Everyone was on the phone and everyone was running from meeting to meeting and everyone was composing flowcharts and visioning logistic models and assessing symptoms. There were four people working eight hours a day on entering the huge amount of data going in and out of our organization; there were several people whose sole job it was to make different colored signs for the various stations so we could all figure out where we were supposed to be. It was someone’s job just to sort out who was available to work and when, someone’s job to make sure everyone had as much carrot cake as they needed. It sounds silly, I guess, to think about all those little details–I found myself in charge of some myself, this afternoon–that have to go right to make sure that everyone stays as healthy as possible, but they really do all have to be in place, down to the data entry and the colored signs and possibly even the carrot cake.

And I guess that’s the whole thing: if everyone does everything correctly, nothing much happens. The people who were exposed stay home a couple of days and get a nasal swab and a packet of flu meds dropped off at their door. The people those people came into contact with, without knowing if they were contagious, get the help they need, if they need it, and basically everything simmers down. It’s a privilege I haven’t thought of much: to live somewhere that has those systems in place, all ready to go at the sneeze of a pig. You hope you’ll rarely have to go into work early and spend your day calling strangers and asking them whether they’re feeling a bit sniffly, but if you do have to do that, at least it’s controlled and intentional. You know what I didn’t see at all today at work? Randomness, or lack of intention. There was obviously a plan, and it was obviously being carried out. Considering all the different people doing all the different jobs and all the planning that’s had to go into something like this, with no guarantee that any of that information would ever be needed, it’s amazing that it’s all just working.

I’ll continue working on Operation Swine for the next couple of days, depending on how everything goes. I am under no illusions that I personally am playing any huge role my ownself—but I feel proud, actually, to be contributing my little bit to something like this, to be able to see how it works from the inside out. I feel grateful for all the little details, and that someone–many people–have put a lot of thought into things I take for granted every day.

I would feel like a bad social worker If I didn’t at least link to some information about flu pandemic in New Zealand. Via my girl Sundry here’s some more American-focused (well, Seattle-focused) stuff. Wash those hands, kids!