by James C. Sherlock
If senior members of the state bureaucracies escape accountability for their failures before and during COVID, the agency cultures won’t change and it will happen again.
I am going to review below the extent of their written responsibilities for pandemic planning and the high quality planning support they were given before COVID struck.
It is clear that the planning framework, guidance and assumptions from 2012 proved prescient in COVID.
Those responsibilities were widely ignored within the government of Virginia in the nearly eight years between when the directive was published and COVID struck. Readers can judge for themselves how much it mattered that the required planning was not carried out.
Post-COVID “lessons learned” written by the state bureaucracies will be utterly insufficient if left to stand alone. There is only one overarching lesson learned. Some did not do their jobs and people died as a direct result. Continue reading