Navigating the Pandemic: Assessing San Diego's COVID-19 Incident Action Plan and Its Feasibility - Free Paper

The San Diego authorities are trying to facilitate their fight against the COVID-19 pandemic using their incident action plan. The incident action plan documents the incident goals, operational period objectives, and response strategies as defined by the San Diego County government. The action plan identified the homeless population as a risk factor because of their exposure to the environment and the probability of becoming an unmonitored vector for transmission. However, as is the case in emergency cases, coming up with a plan and implementing it are two different parts. An assessment of the objectives and response strategy indicates that the plan is feasible but not necessarily effective.

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The plan has a narrow scope that focuses on a specific group. According to the action plan, they have applied the principles and practices of public health for the San Diego Convention Center, which is a homeless shelter. It ensures that the county can concentrate its resources on a specific area. The action plan also enables the city to mobilize and control its human resources, such as to ensure they do not place too much on one area while neglecting other sectors that might need similar attention. The plan recognizes that homeless people are a group that can be hard to trace. These groups do not have a permanent physical address, and it might be hard to identify some homeless people. Using homeless shelters as a way to control the spread of the disease ensures that homeless people get to come for medical treatment rather than the health practitioners going out to search for them.

The incident action plan also dedicates a considerable amount of resources to the operation. Family support, chaplains, peer support, and focus units are some of the resources that have been assigned to deal with various incidents. The city is not sparing resources when it comes to dealing with the pandemic, and that increases the feasibility of the plan. Based on the size of San Diego and the number of homeless people, the city will need to dedicate significant personnel numbers in order to make a meaningful impact on the spread of the virus through the homeless population.

However, the plan’s effectiveness is compromised by the lack of flexibility and learning mechanisms despite being feasible due to the availability of resources and scope of action. The action plan has a detailed outline and instructions to control the movement of people and information to minimize risk. The plan lacks room for flexibility so that the team can adapt and improvise according to the situation to allow the plan to evolve. The teams involved need to learn as they proceed with the plan to enable them to become even more effective in dealing with future incidents. The plan lacks a feedback loop that will provide an upward flow of information. The upward flow of information ensures that everyone in the incident management team knows the results based on their actions. In as much as the plan is detailed, it does not account for every possible scenario that the team can encounter in the line of duty. That makes the plan less effective because there will be certain situations for which the action plan will not be addressed. For example, the plan talks about several incident areas but fails to mention incidents in the county offices. It seems the team will need to improvise in such a situation.

As far as action plans go, the San Diego incidence action plan is good and easy to implement. The plan seeks to handle the emergency by using the resources available to the county. The plan has a narrow scope that allows the teams involved to concentrate all their efforts in specific areas. They have also dedicated a considerable amount of resources to ensure the plan goes through. However, the plan fails to create room for change, innovation, and learning. Every action plan needs a feedback loop to ensure that the teams get to learn as they proceed with their tasks.