CHAPTER 3

Not All Disasters Are Disasters: Pandemic Classification and Its Consequences

Amanda Savitt and Samantha Montano

The COVID-19 pandemic has created considerable challenges for disaster scholarship, practice, and policy because it did not fit neatly into our existing understanding of disasters. Issues that people have grappled with for decades took on new urgency during the global threat. Among these issues, the fundamental question “what is a disaster?” was once again raised as scholars considered how our existing knowledge could be used to inform the pandemic response.1 To that end, US emergency management scholars turned to the hazard event type classification.2 Categorizing COVID-19 using this classification is a key research activity for emergency management and is necessary for understanding human behavior and response activities during the pandemic.

The hazard event type classification categorizes hazard events as emergencies, disasters, or catastrophes.3 Many of the events that might colloquially be called “disasters” differ in significant ways (e.g., the response to the Boston Marathon bombing versus the Dust Bowl) and may in fact be an emergency or a catastrophe.

Emergencies are primarily managed locally using existing plans and procedures to address relatively limited impacts and needs (e.g., the 2020 Chicago car pileup).4 Compared to emergencies, disasters have more impacts and needs, require participation from more organizations, and necessitate more complex procedures and plans (e.g., the 2011 Joplin tornado). Disasters include the emergence of spontaneous response efforts and convergence of people and resources to the impacted area.5 In a catastrophe there are widespread impacts and needs covering a large geographic area. Local and often national organizations are overwhelmed, and regional or international assistance is needed, although it is slow to arrive. Existing plans and procedures are insufficient, and extensive improvisation and outside leadership are required (e.g., Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure).6

As the response to the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, questions immediately emerged about how to understand it in the context of disaster theory.7 Had the pandemic been categorized using the hazard event classification early in the response, we would likely have seen improved response effectiveness. Although the federal response to the pandemic has officially ended, this categorization work remains important because the pandemic has generated and will continue to generate an immense wave of disaster research. Findings will be more valuable if they are situated in existing disaster theory, including how researchers classify the pandemic.

COVID Hazard Event Analysis

Appropriate hazard event classification helps to prevent a misgeneralization of findings to other types of hazard events.8 In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure, Enrico Quarantelli argued it had been a catastrophe, not a disaster.9 His observations laid the groundwork for disaster researchers to situate their work within a catastrophe framework. Here, we analyze the COVID-19 response using the four dimensions most often cited by disaster researchers: impacts, needs, stakeholder involvement, and management approach.

Impacts

Since it emerged in December 2019, COVID-19 has impacted all parts of society. Catastrophes are characterized by extreme direct and indirect impacts.10 Direct impacts included disease infection, illness, and death. The total number of cases in the United States has reached into the hundreds of millions.11 According to the official death toll, more than one million people in the United States have died due to COVID,12 and millions of hospital admissions have resulted.13 Although many disease impacts were acute, some were chronic (i.e., long COVID). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly one in five American adults who have had COVID (one in thirteen adults, or 7.5 percent of the US adult population) continue to manage long COVID.14

Although direct impacts were devastating, the indirect impacts of the pandemic, including those generated by response activities and policies, have also been substantial. Due to the nature of COVID transmission, governments mandated business closures, resulting in lost economic activity, layoffs, and changes in work environments, and school closures, which impacted how education was delivered and also impacted children’s access to resources such as school lunches. In addition, response policies impacted public transit ridership, the economic vitality of many downtown business and financial districts, community demographics and real estate (e.g., people moving away from the physical locations of their jobs), and more. These changes also disrupted people’s social networks and social lives, contributing to a national mental health crisis.15 COVID-19 also indirectly impacted supply chains and the availability of certain goods and services.

As would be expected in a catastrophe, the pandemic’s impacts affected individuals, organizations, communities, and systems.16 US health care, for example, experienced impacts across all levels. At the individual level, nurses and doctors were overwhelmed with new requirements and demands associated with the pandemic. At the organizational level, hospitals struggled to address community needs as well as the needs of their staff. Due to these individual and organizational impacts, communities’ needs for adequate medical services could not be met in many places. The cumulative effect of these impacts over time and across the country put a system-level strain on health care.

Although everyone was impacted in some way by the pandemic, impacts were distributed unequally.17 Patterns of extreme inequality in impacts are characteristic of catastrophes. People of color, poor and low-income people, and older adults (to name a few groups) were disproportionately impacted both directly and indirectly. These disproportionate impacts were rooted in both preexisting inequalities (e.g., people working in service industries, who face greater transmission risk, are disproportionately from marginalized groups) and the way the response was structured (e.g., service industry jobs were deemed “essential,” so workers were put in higher risk situations). There were also unique impacts for certain groups of people. For example, people of Asian descent experienced an increase in hate crimes and discrimination.18

The pandemic’s direct impacts have persisted for multiple years, setting this event apart from traditional hazard events. At first, impacts were relatively isolated in major cities such as Seattle and New York. However, both direct and indirect impacts quickly spread across the country. Although there were identifiable waves in terms of the number of cases a community experienced, indirect impacts have consistently affected the whole population. Overall, the geographic impacts of the pandemic have been widespread.

Needs

The pandemic’s varied impacts have generated profound needs, which (like impacts) have often differed based on geography and have evolved over time. The presence of extreme need, as was observed during the pandemic, is associated with catastrophes, as compared to emergencies and disasters.19 Needs have ranged from the physical to the social, the economic, and the cultural20 and have been both hazard-generated and response-generated.21 Hazard-generated needs included access to medical tools, including ventilators, tests, vaccines, and masks/personal protective equipment. Response-generated needs included coordination of vaccine distribution, personal protective equipment, and other lifesaving medical equipment. The pandemic also made visible systemic and endemic needs within communities (i.e., latent needs).22 These ranged from issues related to education, food insecurity, childcare, homelessness, employment, and incarceration. The response to these latent needs became interwoven with the response to hazard- and response-generated needs, as the pandemic revealed the precarity of our societal and economic arrangements and deepened inequalities. For example, the federal policy response to COVID-19 included the Child Tax Credit, which reduced child poverty nationwide. When this policy was terminated, child poverty rose again.23

Needs have also manifested at the individual (e.g., need for rental assistance), organizational (e.g., need for business loans), community (e.g., need for public assistance funding), and system (e.g., need for economic policy to counter the recessionary effects of the pandemic) levels. Like impacts, needs were geographically scattered and widespread at various points during the pandemic. Some needs were directly associated with COVID-19’s variant waves, such as access to hospital beds. However, many needs were more closely associated with the timing and implementation of pandemic policies, such as school shutdowns leading to a need for childcare.

Throughout the pandemic, needs have manifested unequally.24 For example, the needs of individuals working in the service industry were different from the needs of individuals whose jobs could be done remotely. Some people were able to meet most of their basic needs through their own resources; however, many others were unable to find the resources to meet their needs.

Stakeholder Involvement

Catastrophes require the involvement of a large number of stakeholders, often at all levels of government, including international groups.25 The pandemic began locally, like all hazard events, but soon involved stakeholders at all levels, both domestically and internationally. Due to the extraordinary breadth of needs, it was impossible for local governments alone to meet their communities’ needs effectively, and it quickly became apparent that states and the federal government would need to take on a greater leadership role than is typical in a disaster.26 A defining characteristic of a catastrophe is that leadership must come from outside the impacted community.27

Countless groups emerged throughout the pandemic to meet various needs. Every type of organization, from foundations to small local mutual-aid groups to virtually all businesses, mobilized. Moreover, individuals and households were also implicated in the response to the pandemic, as their choices affected overall outcomes. While everyone was involved in some way, the actual scope, scale, and timing of each stakeholder’s participation in the response has differed greatly.

As is typical of catastrophes, media coverage has been persistent at the local, national, and international levels.28 Although constant, there have been spikes following high-profile political debates as cases increased and when vaccines and other protective measures became available. Media has provided basic information about the virus, protective actions, and political analysis, which has significantly impacted how people perceive COVID and the efficacy of protective actions. Media has also contributed to the spread of misinformation and poor response decisions and actions.29

Management Approach

Ideally, a response is led by a unified body that coordinates responding organizations and activities, develops science-based policies, and engages with existing management systems. However, catastrophes are defined by the inability of existing emergency management approaches to be used effectively.30 As is clear from the death toll and the extent of unmet needs, the management approach used in the COVID-19 response was inadequate.31 The breadth of impacts, needs, and stakeholder involvement and the extent of new and emerging systems to manage the response and react to the changing needs of society created a complex environment for the management of COVID-19.

The risk of a pandemic had long been known, and a great deal of planning had been done prior to the emergence of COVID-19, particularly within public health.32 Although there was a framework in place for agencies to follow, these pre-COVID efforts largely proved inadequate to manage the pandemic. For example, the prepandemic silos between public health and emergency management created conditions ripe for communication and coordination challenges.33 Because we generally prepare for disasters rather than for catastrophes, before the response had even begun we could assume that existing preparedness efforts would not be adequate for a catastrophic pandemic. Existing response tools such as the National Incident Management System and the Incident Command System, which were designed to be used during disasters, have infamously fallen short during catastrophic incidents.34 Not all the agencies involved in the response were trained in or agreed to use the Incident Command System, which led to reductions in response effectiveness.35 These inadequacies in preparedness efforts created significant hurdles for response.

Local officials almost immediately had to address shortages of medical equipment as well as ignorance about what protective actions to recommend to keep their communities safe. Traditionally, help converges from outside communities to impacted communities to meet needs;36 however, during COVID, because every community had been impacted, little additional help was available, and the traditional “mass assault” of help never occurred. Because local communities were overwhelmed by response activities, state governments and the federal governments had to take on a more operational role than usual. Unfortunately, the federal approach largely failed to utilize the existing response infrastructure in a timely way.

The federal response to the pandemic took place across two presidential administrations with two different approaches. The first Trump administration downplayed the pandemic’s risk to the public,37 and Trump promoted pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. One study found that President Trump was “likely the largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation ‘infodemic.’”38 Under the first Trump administration, while dedicated public servants were involved in response efforts, political insiders also had important decision-making responsibilities, which contributed to the ineffective pandemic response.39 By comparison, the Biden administration took over with the slogan “follow the science” and relied more heavily on dedicated public servants who used a more unified approach to the response.40 Still, the Biden administration also underplayed pandemic-related risks to the benefit of social and economic concerns41 and began to eliminate pandemic programs and policies even as COVID cases continued to emerge.42 Elements of the federal response, however, did meet some public needs, such as free tests provided through the postal service, the student loan pause, COVID relief checks, and the Paycheck Protection Program loans.

A lack of comprehensive federal policy to address the direct impacts of COVID-19 forced states to make independent policy decisions.43 Some states such as Maine were comparatively proactive in their management approach by following the guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health experts, enacting stay-at-home orders and mask mandates and taking testing seriously, especially until vaccines became available. However, other states, such as North Dakota took a more laissez-faire approach, allowing businesses to remain open, not requiring residents to wear masks, and downplaying the risks of COVID.44 In the absence of clear instructions from higher levels of government, local officials often were also left on their own to make complex policy decisions for their communities.

As expected in a catastrophe, much of the pandemic response was improvised. This included policy creation (e.g., mask mandates, school and business closures), the establishment of task forces and committees across levels of government, and the formation of new procedures (e.g., vaccine rollouts), among others. These improvised approaches differed from community to community and over time within jurisdictions and nationally. This improvisation happened, at least in part, due to the absence of comprehensive and well-integrated public health and emergency management plans.45 Even with prepandemic planning, improvisation would have happened anyway because the pandemic was an unprecedented event. For the first time, every local and state emergency management agency was simultaneously engaged in a response. There was also an improvised response among other stakeholders, including business owners in their approach to managing employees and structuring their organizations, nonprofits when fundraising and meeting client needs, and individuals and households in their daily lives. As noted earlier and as is typical of catastrophes,46 many emergent groups formed to meet the needs unmet by the formal system.

Some have argued that coordination in a catastrophe is all but impossible.47 The all-of-society response to the pandemic made the possibility of effective coordination impractical. There was insufficient coordination at multiple levels from the very early stages of the response (e.g., the federal government was unable to effectively coordinate which states received ventilators).48 However, because of the duration of the response, agencies and communities could formalize efforts and develop effective coordination mechanisms and strategies. Because the direct impacts tended to manifest in waves, agencies and task forces had the opportunity to implement changes from earlier waves into their response to subsequent waves. Whether they did so effectively is a question for future research.

Communication across stakeholders in the formal response has similarly been a challenge. For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, poor communication led to confusion over how the federal government would be distributing limited personal protective equipment resources to states.49 These communication failures were further compounded by a lack of trust between stakeholders. For example, the governor of Maryland deployed the National Guard to protect the state’s personal protective equipment resources out of fear that the federal government would take them.50 The extensive policy uncertainty complicated individual responses. For example, whether or not eviction moratoria would be extended became a major question that left individuals unsure if they would have a place to live.

Another major communication issue has been the transmission of risk and protective action information from the scientific community to the public and public officials and from public officials to the public. Lack of trust in government, scientists, and public health officials contributed to widespread conspiracy theorizing and to false or misleading information being shared by some private individuals, public officials, and members of the media. At a national level, this hampered appropriate response policies and activities due to the level of public pushback.51

Unlike traditional response behavior, in which individuals are generally characterized by their prosocial behavior,52 some segments of the population began to behave in heterogeneous and counterproductive/destructive ways. In a more traditional short-duration response, such as that to a tornado, there is simply not enough time for these maladaptive behaviors to emerge on a large scale. This suggests that the pandemic may have evolved from a consensus event to a conflict event.

COVID as a Catastrophe

The COVID-19 pandemic has created widespread impacts globally, impeding the ability of communities to support one another. In the United States, community functions were sharply curtailed. Local resources, including emergency organizations, were directly impacted in many places. The pandemic garnered widespread national and global media attention, which helped shape our understanding of the event, particularly as scientific reality has been disputed and politicized. For all of these reasons, the pandemic fits best into our definition of a catastrophe.

However, the pandemic differs from the current articulation of catastrophic events in important ways. Rather than widespread destruction of housing and infrastructure, the pandemic has manifested through illness and death, economic recession, and a strain on health and governance systems. Local leadership has largely remained intact, allowing for locally-led responses (although, as noted above, federal leadership has also been necessary). The help that usually converges from surrounding communities was largely absent due to the diffuse nature of needs and impacts. Finally, where ordinarily the events that disaster researchers study are relatively short in duration and are contained geographically, the pandemic was a global event that required a multiyear response.

This analysis suggests that although the pandemic fits most closely within the catastrophe category of the hazard event type classification, it does not fit neatly within that category (e.g., types of impacts are atypical, local leadership remains intact, the duration of the event itself is long). Although the pandemic shares many characteristics with a catastrophe, there are enough differences to suggest that the duration of the response sets the pandemic (and potentially other hazard events) apart from catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure.53 While some may interpret the inability to perfectly categorize the pandemic as a failure of the hazard event classification, we view it as an important moment for refinement. The pandemic indicates that the catastrophe category needs to be expanded or that a new category needs to be articulated.

Implications for Research, Practice, and Policy

It is in the best interest of disaster researchers and the public to further explore the unique nature of the different categories of hazard events, establish their similarities and differences, and identify their implications for emergency management research, practice, and policymaking.

Although research suggests that the way we should respond to emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes are categorically different,54 researchers have tended to generalize research findings across event types. This not only represents poor scientific practice but may also be dangerous for the public, especially when decisions about management are made based on this research. As global COVID research initiatives are undertaken, it is especially important to consider these theoretical issues.

Our purpose is not to be prescriptive about the meanings of words but instead to illuminate the value of identifying how hazard events differ. It is a foundational goal of an emerging academic discipline such as emergency management to distinguish between phenomena.55 We agree with Quarantelli that while explicit definitions are not necessary for the continued advancement of social science research on disasters, further conceptual clarity is both valuable and necessary. This is not just a theoretical exercise but is also a practical one, as our analysis demonstrates.

The differences between types of hazard events necessitates that emergency management efforts, including the preparedness for, response to, and recovery from those events, be handled differently.56 For example, requisite resources (including staff time), strategies for mobilization, demobilization and remobilization, and relationships and responsibilities across government agencies and throughout the community are different from one type of event to another. Practice has long recognized the differences in planning required to respond to emergencies as compared to disasters, and the entire emergency management system has been built to recognize this difference.57 Yet practice does not fully recognize catastrophes as being events unique from disasters.58 Disaster researchers have warned that when a catastrophic event is responded to as though it is a disaster, the response will fail.59

Furthermore, planning in this way ignores events that are on the fringes of these conceptualizations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The absence of a shared conceptual understanding of an event such as the pandemic can result in confusion, which has consequences for how it is understood and managed. We also must reconsider the hazard event categories as they currently exist and use new or refined categories to develop more appropriate and effective management strategies.

In the same way that practice has evolved to recognize the differences between managing an emergency and a disaster, practice must now not only evolve to recognize the differences between managing a disaster and a catastrophe but also recognize the differences between managing types of catastrophes. This is particularly important as our hazardscape evolves because of climate change, increasing globalization, development, and new technologies. Emergency management policy that relies on a static set of hazard types will fail to address new but impactful threats.

The pandemic has revealed fundamental problems that affect emergency management theory, practice, and policy. In the same way that Quarantelli challenged researchers to “think outside of their usual perceptual boxes” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure, we are now challenged again to do so with the COVID-19 pandemic. This is an old conversation with new importance in the face of not only the pandemic but also our increasingly complex world.

Notes

1. 1.  Ronald W. Perry and Enrico L. Quarantelli, eds., What Is a Disaster? New Answers to Old Questions (Xlibris, 2005); and Enrico L. Quarantelli, ed., What Is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question (Routledge, 1998).
2. 2.  Jessica Jensen, “Emergency Management Theory: Unrecognized, Underused, and Underdeveloped,” in Integrating Emergency Management into Higher Education: Ideas, Programs and Strategies, ed. Jessica A. Hubbard (Public Entity Risk Institute, 2010); Brenda D. Phillips, David M. Neal, and Gary Webb, Introduction to Emergency Management, 2nd ed. (CRC Press, 2016).
3. 3.  See, for example, Jensen, “Emergency Management Theory”; and Enrico L. Quarantelli, “Emergencies, Disasters, and Catastrophes Are Different Phenomena,” Paper presented at the Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 2000, https://udspace.udel.edu/items/97fb43f2-9ec3-44ac-b038-3d24285af389.
4. 4.  Erik Auf der Heide, Disaster Response: Principles of Preparation and Coordination (Mosby, 1989); and Lori Peek, Tricia Wachtendorf, and Michelle Annette Meyer, “Sociology of Disasters,” in Handbook of Environmental Sociology, ed. Beth Schaefer Caniglia et al. (Springer, 2021).
5. 5.  Peek et al., “Sociology of Disasters”; Quarantelli, “Emergencies, Disasters, and Catastrophes Are Different Phenomena”; and Kathleen Tierney, “Hurricane Katrina: Catastrophic Impacts and Alarming Lessons,” in Risking House and Home: Disasters, Cities, Public Policy, ed. J. M. Quigley and L. A. Rosenthal (Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2008).
6. 6.  John Barnshaw, Lynn Letukas, and Enrico L. Quarantelli, “The Characteristics of Catastrophes and Their Social Evolution,” Paper presented at the Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 2008, http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/3766; Peek et al., “Sociology of Disasters”; and Kathleen Tierney, Disasters: A Sociological Approach (Polity, 2019).
7. 7.  Samantha Montano and Amanda Savitt, “Not All Disasters Are Disasters: Pandemic Categorization and Its Consequences,” Items, September 10, 2020, https://items.ssrc.org/COVID-19-and-the-social-sciences/disaster-studies/not-all-disasters-are-disasters-pandemic-categorization-and-its-consequences/; and Richard A. Buck, “A Better Approach to Managing COVID-19 and Its Effects,” in “COVID-19,” special issue, Journal of Emergency Management 18, no. 7 (2020): 151–56, https://doi.org/10.5055/jem.0527
8. 8.  Enrico L. Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters: Some Implications for Crisis Planning and Managing Drawn from Katrina,” Items, June 11, 2006, https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/catastrophes-are-different-from-disasters-some-implications-for-crisis-planning-and-managing-drawn-from-katrina/.
9. 9.  Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters.”
10. 10.  Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters”; and Tierney, Disasters.
11. 11.  Jordan Allen et al., “Coronavirus in the US: Latest Case Count,” New York Times, March 23, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/COVID-cases.html.
12. 12.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “COVID Data Tracker,” accessed April 30, 2025, https://covid.cdc.gov/COVID-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths_select_00.
13. 13.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “NHSN Hospital Respiratory Data (HRD) Dashboard,” accessed April 30, 2025, https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/psc/hospital-respiratory-dashboard.html.
14. 14.  National Center for Health Statistics/CDC, “Nearly One in Five American Adults Who Have Had COVID-19 Still Have ‘Long COVID,’” news release, June 22, 2022, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/20220622.htm.
15. 15.  David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, “Covid and Mental Health in America,” PLoS ONE 17, no. 7 (2022): e0269855, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269855.
16. 16.  Allen H. Barton, Communities in Disaster: A Sociological Analysis of Collective Stress Situations (Doubleday, 1969); National Research Council, Facing Hazards and Disasters: Understanding Human Dimensions (National Academies Press, 2006).
17. 17.  See, for example, Lisa R. Fortuna, Marina Tolou-Shams, Barbara Robles-Ramamurthy, and Michelle V. Porche, “Inequity and the Disproportionate Impact of COVID-19 on Communities of Color in the United States: The Need for a Trauma-Informed Social Justice Response,” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 12, no. 5 (2020): 443 443–45, https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000889.
18. 18.  Cary Wu, Yue Qian, and Rima Wilkes, “Anti-Asian Discrimination and the Asian-White Mental Health Gap during COVID-19,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 5 (2021): 819–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2020.1851739.
19. 19.  Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters.”
20. 20.  Donald A. Donahue, Stephen O. Cunnion, Carey D. Balaban, and Ken Sochats, “The All Needs Approach to Emergency Response,” Homeland Security Affairs 8 (February 2012): 1–17, https://www.hsaj.org/articles/204.
21. 21.  Russell R. Dynes, E. L. Quarantelli, and Gary A. Kreps, A Perspective on Disaster Planning, 3rd ed. (Disaster Research Center, 1981), http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/1259.
22. 22.  See, for example, Kelly M. Doran and Adam Tinson, “Homelessness and Public Health: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” European Journal of Homelessness 15, no. 3 (2021): 49–62, https://www.feantsaresearch.org/public/user/Observatory/2021/EJH_15-3/Final/EJH_15-3_A3.pdf.
23. 23.  Francine J. Lipman, “Pandemic Tax Relief Pummels Child Poverty: Time to Make It Permanent,” Human Rights 48, no. 2 (2023): 18–19, https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/wealth-disparities-in-civil-rights/pandemic-tax-relief-pummels-child-poverty/#:~:text=The%20CTC%20reduced%20the%202021,Asian%20children%20(110%2C000%20children).
24. 24.  Danielle N. Gadson, “Advancing Equity in Public Administration: Prioritizing Equality of Outcomes in the COVID-19 Crisis,” Risk, Hazards, and Crisis in Public Policy 11, no. 4 (2020): 449–457, https://doi.org/10.1002/rhc3.12206; and Lauren A. Clay and Stephanie Rogus, “Impact of Employment, Essential Work, and Risk Factors on Food Access During the COVID-19 Pandemic in New York State,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 4 (2021): 1451, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18041451.
25. 25.  Angela M. Eikenberry, Verónica Arroyave, and Tracy Cooper, “Administrative Failure and The International NGO Response to Hurricane Katrina,” Public Administration Review 67, no. S1 (December 2007): 160–70; and Enrico L. Quarantelli, “Conventional Beliefs and Counterintuitive Realities,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 75, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 873–904, https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2008.0003.
26. 26.  Nathan Myers and Tonya E. Thornton, “Accountability, Polarization, and Federalism: Oversight During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic,” in “COVID-19 #2,” special issue, Journal of Emergency Management 19, no. 7 (2021): 49–58, https://doi.org/10.5055/jem.0613.
27. 27.  Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters.”
28. 28.  Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters.”
29. 29.  Erfei Zhao et al., “Media Trust and Infection Mitigating Behaviours During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the USA,” BMJ Global Health 5, no. 10 (2020): e003323, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003323.
30. 30.  Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters.”
31. 31.  Buck, “A Better Approach to Managing COVID-19 and Its Effects,” 151–56; and Irwin Redlener, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Sean Hansen, and Nathaniel Hupert, 130,000–210,000 Avoidable COVID-19 Deaths–and Counting–in the US (National Center for Disaster Preparedness, The Earth Institute, Columbia University, 2020).
32. 32.  Amanda Savitt, Logan Gerber-Chavez, Samantha Montano, and Tanya Corbin, “Emergency Management Pandemic Planning: An Analysis of State Emergency Plans,” in “Research and Applied Science: COVID-19 Pandemic Response,” special issue, Journal of Emergency Management 21, no. 7 (2023): 97–109, https://doi.org/10.5055/jem.0667.
33. 33.  Savitt et al., “Emergency Management Pandemic Planning.”
34. 34.  Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters.”
35. 35.  State of Oregon, “State of Oregon After-Action Review Enterprise Response to COVID-19,” November 2020, https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2019I1/Downloads/CommitteeMeetingDocument/227575.
36. 36.  Russell R. Dynes and Enrico L. Quarantelli, Group Behavior Under Stress: A Required Convergence of Organizational and Collective Behavior Perspectives (Disaster Research Center, Ohio State University, 1968).
37. 37.  Francis T. Cullen, Amanda Graham. Cheryl Lero Jonson, Justin T. Pickett, and Melissa M. Sloan, “The Denier in Chief: Faith in Trump and Techniques of Neutralization in a Pandemic,” Deviant Behavior 43, no. 7 (2022): 829–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2021.1918035.
38. 38.  Sarah Evanega, Mark Lynas, Jordan Adams, and Karinne Smolenyak, “Coronavirus Misinformation: Quantifying Sources and Themes in the COVID-19 ‘Infodemic,’” JMIR Preprints, October 19, 2020, https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/25143.
39. 39.  Katherine Eban, “How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan ‘Went Poof into Thin Air,’” Vanity Fair, July 30, 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air.
40. 40.  Naim Kapucu and Donald Moynihan, “Trump’s (Mis)management of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US,” in “The Trump Administration,” ed. Toby S. James, special issue, Policy Studies 42, no. 5–6 (2021): 592–610, https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2021.1931671.
41. 41.  Lev Facher, “‘The Scientists, They’re Learning More’: A Defiant Biden Defends the CDC amid Mounting Criticism,” STAT News, January 19, 2022, https://www.statnews.com/2022/01/19/biden-defends-cdc-criticism-COVID-response/.
42. 42.  Sharon LaFraniere and Noah Weiland, “US Plans to End Public Health Emergency for COVID in May,” New York Times, February 3, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/us/politics/biden-COVID-public-health-emergency.html.
43. 43.  Courtney Page-Tan and Tanya Buhler Corbin, “Protective Policies for All? An Analysis of Covid-19 Deaths and Protective Policies Among Low-, Medium-, and High-Vulnerability Groups,” Disasters 45, no. S1 (2021): S119–S145, https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12525.
44. 44.  Seth Tupper, “Two Rural States with GOP Governors and Very Different COVID-19 Results,” NPR, November 20, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/11/20/936800456/two-rural-states-with-gop-governors-and-very-different-COVID-19-results.
45. 45.  Savitt et al., “Emergency Management Pandemic Planning.”
46. 46.  Samantha L. Montano, “Formation and Lifespans of Emergent Recovery Groups in Post-Katrina New Orleans” (PhD diss., North Dakota State University, 2014).
47. 47.  Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters.”
48. 48.  Naim Kapucu and Qian Hu, “An Old Puzzle and Unprecedented Challenges: Coordination in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US,” Public Performance & Management Review 45, no. 4 (2022): 773–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/15309576.2022.2040039.
49. 49.  Daniel Joseph Finkenstadt and Robert Handfield, “Blurry Vision: Supply Chain Visibility for Personal Protective Equipment During COVID-19,” Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management 27, no. 3 (June 2021): 100689, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pursup.2021.100689.
50. 50.  Paul LeBlanc, “Hogan: Maryland Protected Coronavirus Tests It Secured from South Korea ‘Like Fort Knox,’” CNN, April 30, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/larry-hogan-coronavirus-masks-national-guard/index.html.
51. 51.  See, for example, Daniel Romer and Kathleen H. Jamieson, “Conspiracy Theories as Barriers to Controlling the Spread of COVID-19 in the US,” Social Science & Medicine 263 (October 2020): 113356, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113356.
52. 52.  Havidán Rodríguez, Joseph Trainor, and Enrico L. Quarantelli, “Rising to the Challenges of a Catastrophe: The Emergent and Prosocial Behavior Following Hurricane Katrina,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604, no. 1 (2006): 82–101, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716205284677.
53. 53.  Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters.”
54. 54.  Auf der Heide, Disaster Response; and Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters.”
55. 55.  Jensen, “Emergency Management Theory,” 7–24.
56. 56.  Quarantelli, “Catastrophes Are Different from Disasters.”
57. 57.  Auf der Heide, Disaster Response.
58. 58.  Richard T. Sylves, Disaster Policy and Politics: Emergency Management and Homeland Security, 3rd ed. (CQ Press, 2019).
59. 59.  Kathleen J. Tierney, “Testimony on Needed Emergency Management Reforms,” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 4, no. 3 (2007), https://doi.org/10.2202/1547-7355.1388.