Flu pandemic might cause security headaches

Personnel safety worries hospitals

If a flu pandemic strikes North Carolina, heavily armed police officers and deputies will ride shotgun over doctors and nurses working in tent hospitals, guard scarce supplies of antiviral drugs and vaccine and enforce tough public health mandates such as the closing of shopping malls, churches and schools.

Learning lessons from the lawless chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, state and local disaster planners see the need for a more muscular law enforcement presence. Officers would handle crowd control at hospitals, and guard vaccine distribution centers and temporary medical facilities in arenas and other large buildings to handle the overflow of flu-stricken patients expected during a worldwide flu epidemic.

If a severe pandemic hits North Carolina, it could kill more than 66,000 people and leave more than 291,000 in need of hospital care, federal computer models show. Because developing a vaccine that specifically targets a pandemic flu virus would take up to six months, public health officials would be forced to rely on old-school measures to dampen the spread of the disease.

Police officers and deputies would enforce these emergency measures, which would include isolating the sick, quarantining those suspected of being infected and closing public places and events where the virus could be easily spread.

"We'd have to enforce those laws and ordinances just like you do in a natural disaster or a riot," said Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison.

Hospital security forces across the state are also drawing up plans for crowd control, emergency traffic patterns and restricted access to their buildings, borrowing a term more commonly heard from prison officials -- lockdown. Katrina's aftermath, with looting and violence in New Orleans and elsewhere, also has prompted them to focus on the safety of doctors and nurses working outside the hospital.

"We learned from Katrina that you need to go farther out in your planning than your front door," said WakeMed Police Chief Lisa Pryse, head of a hospital police force with more than 50 officers who are also trained to provide basic emergency medical care. "We got more specifically serious after Katrina because we realized we did not need a bioterrorism event for there to be a threat to a key community asset."

As a result, Pryse plans to send her officers to guard WakeMed doctors and nurses sent out with mobile medical units.

"We would not roll a truck out of here without an armed presence," said Bill Atkinson, WakeMed's president and chief executive officer. "You think about what's going to happen if there's X vaccine and Y people who need it -- that becomes a major security problem on top of everything else."

Pryse, with a cadre of fully trained police officers and mutual aid agreements with law enforcement agencies across the county, can send a security force anywhere that WakeMed doctors and nurses are deployed.

Other North Carolina hospitals, such as Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, don't have sworn officers on their security force and rely on local law enforcement agencies to guard their personnel. When Carolinas Medical Center sent its mobile hospital to Waveland, Miss., for seven weeks last year to treat Hurricane Katrina survivors, SWAT team members from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department provided security, said Bryan Warren, the hospital's manager for investigations and training.

But public health officials worry whether local law enforcement agencies will be able to meet the increased responsibilities expected during a pandemic. They point out these agencies might have as much as 40 percent of their officers absent during a pandemic.

But Harrison, the Wake sheriff, said he thinks dedication to duty will overcome any manpower shortages.

"Are you going to have some absences -- probably so," he said. "But we've got to do what we need to do, and if that means working extra hours to cover a shift, we'll do it."