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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. Today, with the recent expiration of the COVID emergency orders,

we check in on the state of emergency preparedness in the U.S.

Dr. Josh Sharfstein speaks to Dr. Nadine Gracia, president and CEO of Trust for America's Health,

an organization that releases annual ratings and rankings of state readiness in a report called Ready or Not.

Let's listen.

Dr. Nadine Grascia, thank you so much for coming to talk about the Trust for America's

Health recent report on preparedness. How are you? Doing well. Thanks for the opportunity.

It's great to be with you. Now, this is officially a post-pandemic podcast in the sense that the emergency declaration has expired.

We know that COVID-19 is still out there. And this report starts to take a little bit of a look back as it looks forward.

Yeah, that's right. We are transitioning out of the emergency phase of the pandemic. Certainly recognize that COVID-19

is still with us. And this report in particular, it really assesses our nation's level of public health

preparedness by looking at states measure of readiness for all hazards. It's not specifically about the COVID-19

pandemic, but measures indicators of preparedness.

And what this year's report found is that 19 states and the District of Columbia performed

in the high performance tier, 16 states were in the middle performance tier, and 15 states

in the low performance tier.

Now, how has the concept of emergency preparedness changed over the course of the pandemic?

I know that Trust for America's Health has been doing this report for a number of years.

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