# 992
The Department of Health and Human Services has released their Pandemic Planning Update # IV. You can read it here online, or download the PDF FILE.
Basically this is an overview of what the Federal government has done to date to prepare for a pandemic.
The report is divided into 7 sections. Here are direct links to each of them.
- Message from the Secretary
- Monitoring and Surveillance
- Vaccines and Vaccine Production Capacity
- Antiviral Drugs
- State and Local Preparedness
- Communications
- Timeline
While the US government has spend a good deal of time working on a pandemic response, in many ways our nation remains ill prepared to face a pandemic. The message simply isn't filtering down to the local level.
Local governments are oblivious, many businesses haven't begun to prepare, and most citizens are too preoccupied with other matters, or too distrustful of their government, to listen to warnings.
We've been incredibly lucky not to have seen a pandemic by now. Perhaps that luck will hold. I hope so. Because we aren't even close to being ready to deal with one.
