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Disaster season is upon us. The pandemic changes everything.

Irwin Redlener, a pediatrician, directs the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute at Columbia University; he is also a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and president emeritus of Children’s Health Fund.

It is already clear that 2020 be a year for the history books. The world has lurched from one mega-disaster to the next, witnessing devastating wildfires in Australia, plagues of locusts across East Africa and South Asia, and a pandemic that has crippled the global economy.

Aftershock: If coronavirus swells in a second wave later this year, will the nation be ready?

“We still haven’t gotten our act together,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to have a second, if not a third, wave” because of the nation’s “erratic and disorganized policies.”