# 803
The first 48 hours of the Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog Forum is now complete, and we have 4 essay's online, and scores of comments. This 5-week experiment has just begun, and we have yet to hear from most of the bloggers. New essays will be posted in the coming days.
I urge all of my readers to visit, and participate. This is an important experiment in communications between the government and its people.
Many of those leaving comments are from the flubie community, and it is obvious from the content just how knowledgeable and passionate they are on the subject. While they list many concerns, primary among them is that the message to prepare simply hasn't resonated to the local level.
We've heard from frustrated nurses who fear they will be forced to abandon their jobs during a pandemic because their hospitals aren't preparing. Their concern, and anger, is understandable. The inaction on the part of some medical facilities places them in an impossible situation.
Many have complained that their local officials appear clueless on the pandemic threat, and really don't want to hear about it. While State and Federal preparations are ongoing, that concept just hasn't trickled down.
And of course, there is a certain amount of frustration that those of us in the Flubie community are regarded as loons in our communities, even though we are conveying essentially the same message to our friends and neighbors that the Federal government has been saying for 18 months.
But unless people visit official panflu preparedness websites, like www.pandemicflu.gov, most of them don't understand how seriously the threat of a pandemic is regarded. Hopefully, this blog summit will help raise some awareness.
The federal government has a pandemic plan, which offloads most of the responsibilities to each individual state. Understandable, since no central government could begin to tackle all of the problems likely to surface during a pandemic involving 300 million people.
States were told to develop pandemic plans, and most of them have. Some states are still working on draft plans, and have yet to come up with a finalized version. But in the ones I've seen, they seem to ignore the local response, and simply implore local communities to prepare. There is little or no practical guidance as to how they should accomplish that.
So local governments are left without a clue, as are small businesses, health care facilities, and individual citizens. The good news is, the bureaucracy at the state and federal levels are probably going to be prepared. The bad news is, the remainder of the country is sitting on hold, waiting for direction.
It's as if everyone is sitting at a traffic signal that is stuck on a 4-way red flasher, waiting for it to turn green.
Part of the problem is money. Most local communities don't have the resources to prepare without state or federal assistance. And so they have decided to wait, and ignore the problem, until they see some funding.
But mostly, I think it's a reluctance to risk committing to preparing for what remains a nebulous threat. Everybody is waiting for someone else to take the lead, resulting in a classic Alphonse and Gaston act. ( "After you, sir!" and "No, my dear sir, after you!") Except it isn't out of politeness, it's out of fear of being a pioneer.
They know you can always tell who the pioneers are. They are the ones with arrows in their backs.
Obviously someone needs to break this impasse, and get the ball rolling on the local level.
Otherwise, we run a real danger of procrastinating until we run out of time.
