When it was originally created, Hillsborough County’s Emergency Policy Group never dreamed it would deal with a pandemic.
Hurricanes were managed down to a science with a formula that rarely failed. Relentless storms can and have been handled with care while EPG leaders opened shelters and got highways prepared for the possibility of evacuations.
A pandemic has thrown the group into an entirely new reality. Instead of meeting storm by storm the group has had to buckle in for a now approximately two-month session. They’ve closed restaurants, implemented a curfew, retracted said curfew, set up testing sites, worked with hospitals and inadvertently began writing the rulebook on how future crises of this nature are handled. Now President Donald Trump and Governor Ron DeSantis are discussing reopening the country and the state, respectively.
So where does the EPG fall now?
“Once the Governor’s (order) is detailed my assumption is we would be letting our Emergency Order expire and the three cities would work with the county independently and together in the recovery phase,” Plant City Mayor Rick Lott said. “I am assuming this is not something to where we will have our Declaration of Emergency enforced for a long period of time… Am I accurate in assuming that?”
There wasn’t a clear-cut answer. Hillsborough County Administrator Mike Merrill said once DeSantis releases his detailed order, he assumes there will be some local flexibility. That window of uncertainty as to what exactly would be asked of them is what led many to believe they should simply hunker down and wait until they were told what to do.
Some, spearheaded by Hillsborough County School Board Chair Melissa Snively, said they hope to start using their twice-a-week meetings as a group to hear from even more experts. She suggested they listen to health experts one day and leaders in the business community or economic experts in the other scheduled weekly meeting so they would be able to focus on how to keep the community’s health safe and still go about getting the economy back on track.
The EPG is created to handle the response of a crisis, not its recovery, as was repeatedly mentioned Monday afternoon. Once the state transitions into recovery mode, the fate of the the area will be left in the hands of the county commissioners. However, it is evident Hillsborough County has not fully crossed that bridge yet.
Dr. Douglas Holt, Florida Department of Health director for Hillsborough County, said until the numbers indicated a significant enough portion of the county had been tested it would be hard to know with any certainty whether COVID-19 was truly being handled correctly, or if it was merely hiding. Tim Dudley, Emergency Management Director, reminded everyone gathered that their testing sites were up and running, but there was a larger problem at hand: people simply aren’t coming to be tested.
A survey is in the works to hopefully identify just why the public is not taking advantage of the testing kits available in the county. Dudley speculated part of the issue may be that there is confusion on who is eligible to be tested. Unlike at the start of the pandemic, when kits and PPEs were in short supply, the county is now ready to handle a wave of potentially sick residents. Because of that, it has waived the many boxes you had to check before you could become eligible. Essentially, if you’re sick and want a test, reach out to the call center and you will get an appointment.
Plant City has a testing site of its own at the Plant City Community Resource Center at 307 N. Michigan Ave. You can get an appointment by calling 813-272-5900 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. weekdays.
The county is able to administer 4,000 tests a day, according to Dr. Charles Lockwood, dean of the University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine. Yet right now, only 500 to 700 daily tests are completed. He believes Hillsborough County should test approximately 2,250 people a day before it could know if it was safe to reopen.
Now all the EPG can do is wait. It’s waiting for more people to get tested, waiting for DeSantis to give some directions and waiting to see if this pandemic will end before a hurricane arrives and slips the group back into its original role. At least if another storm does brew on the horizon, there’s some comfort in knowing there’s tried and true steps waiting to guide the group through another hurricane season.