If there's one person who feels she was prepared, just a little bit, for this coronavirus,

it's Wendy Smith-Reeve. She spent decades in emergency management in Arizona. That meant

handling wildfires and floods. Did you prepare specifically for a pandemic?

Yes.

Back in 2019, she was part of a national exercise to see what would happen if a new

strain of flu started spreading in the U.S.

Federal partners, state partners, local partners participated from at least 10 different states.

The exercise was titled Crimson Contagion.

This wargaming lasted months.

It was meant to lay bare who runs what during a health emergency.

A report that came out later made clear the level of confusion in this exercise.

But the beautiful thing about an exercise is you get to test it out before it plays out in real life.

For Wendy, what worked back then when a pandemic was just something the Department of Health and Human Services had dreamt up, was the process,

a rigorous foundation that determined who called the shots and who got the funds.

She admires a proper framework, an operational structure.

You just have to get the right people sitting in the right seats and working together in order to support the citizens that we serve.

Wendy looks at Arizona now, with more than 165,000 COVID cases, more than 3,000 deaths.

And she thinks, with the right chain of command, this might have been preventable.

When did you realize that this framework was breaking down?

I don't think the framework was breaking down.

What was breaking down was lack of understanding and appreciation and knowledge that the framework exists

and is there to support any event.

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