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 hingeling 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 US.

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

The exercise was titled Crimson Contagion.

This war gaming lasted months.

It was mentally bear who runs what during health emergency.

However, board that came out later made clear at the level of confusion in this exercise.

But the beautiful thing about an exercise is you get it tested 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.

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