Individual and community preparedness is fundamental to our national success. Providing individuals and communities with information and resources will facilitate actions to adapt to and withstand a national emergency like COVID-19. In response to COVID-19, EXIS® has released a new exercise scenario to help organizations plan for disruptions to the supply chain and organizational communication.

The scenario helps organizations ensure they can respond to the virus. It covers all surface transportation modes for all mission areas from prevention through recovery. It focuses on testing core capabilities of planning, operational coordination, and intelligence and information sharing. 

Best Practices and Lessons Learned

The best practices below highlight recent experiences from previous exercises that could be useful in preparing for a pandemic threat:

• Ensure that standard operating procedures reflect the safety and legal considerations associated with implementing temporary protective measures, and provide additional guidance based on threat type.
• Ensure that strong relationships for intelligence and information sharing are at the organizational level rather than the individual level. This helps ensure that information is not lost if an individual contact is unavailable. 
• Integrate roles and responsibilities of other entities, such as law enforcement into security plans. This helps to reduce confusion in the case of a complex incident that affects multiple jurisdictions and agencies.

In order to access the new scenario, take the following steps:

1. Create a surface transportation exercise.
2. In the scenario step type "pandemic" in the search bar.
3. Select the exercise.