Not since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic has there been a national emergency with such a globally devastating impact as COVID-19. From the beginning, this union has been at the forefront to protect our members working on the frontlines and to ensure they have the resources, tools and support to respond while keeping their families and communities safe. We stayed ahead of most federal organizations in providing guidance to prepare members to respond during this pandemic.
To document our efforts, we have prepared a COVID-19 Interim After Action Report to detail the challenges our union, our affiliates and our members have faced – and continue to face as the coronavirus continues to spread with cases on the rise – along with steps the IAFF took to address many of these challenges, the guidance and resources we developed and our recommendations for work we still need to do on our members’ behalf on these issues. This project was an extraordinary collaborative effort during this pandemic by headquarters staff from across our programmatic divisions.
The report serves as a reference of the challenges we faced, what we learned and what we did to resolve many of these issues encountered during the initial phases of this pandemic, and what we still need to do.