Apr 4, 2020 2 min read

With the exception of a few extraordinarily hardy centenarians born in or before 1918, no one was alive the last time a deadly pandemic exacted such a toll across the United States and the world, and Randy Padfield, the director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA), said Thursday that he and his colleagues are bound to learn lessons from it.

Those lessons could prove helpful if, as many believe, the coronavirus stages a comeback when the weather turns colder in the fall.

“We continue to learn a lot from this,” Padfield said in a conference call with reporters across Pennsylvania Thursday morning. “There’s a lot we don’t know about this. We continuously look at the data.”

Part of what makes responding to the coronavirus so bewildering is its unpredictable nature, Padfield explained. With a more typical natural disaster, like a floor or tornado, there’s a tried-and-true series of protocols that are followed, a starting point and end point. But no one knows what trajectory the coronavirus will take, and when it will be tamed sufficiently for some semblance of normal life to resume.

“We are in uncharted waters,” Padfield said. “Our crystal ball is very cloudy. We have to adjust what we’re doing with the Department of Health on a daily or hourly basis. We have a lot of complex problem sets and how we deal with those is key.”

One issue PEMA has looked at is the possibility of housing some coronavirus patients at sites that are not typically used as medical centers. Patients Padfield described as “sub-acute” would potentially go to these locations “to decompress the hospital system.” Several news reports have indicated that, in this region, the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh has been eyed as an alternate care site, though there is not yet a need for it.

PEMA started formulating a response to the coronavirus “since well before the first case was recorded in the commonwealth,” according to Padfield.