Why is the Civic Infrastructure Critical to Managing a Mass Health Emergency?
Disasters and Epidemics Compel Citizen Judgment and Action “What makes a disaster a disaster?” has been the subject of much debate in the social and behavioral sciences.6–11 This section relates those characteristics around which scholarly consensus has emerged, and which suggest the need for leaders’ deliberate and thorough integration of community contributions to preparedness, response, and recovery. Comparative, scholarly review indicates that epidemics share these same broad attributes.12–16 Judged solely on the basis of material hazard, extreme events appear idiosyncratic— tornado, hurricane, earthquake, chemical explosion, oil spill, disease outbreak, and the like. In actuality, extreme events have recurrent social features: Shock-producing damages As captured in the Greek roots of the words “catastrophe” and “cataclysm,” a disaster is a violent overthrowing of the status quo—an event that dramatically ruptures everyday expectations about physical survival, the social order, and
