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.” 

Don't open businesses until rapid reliable testing available everywhere

The U.S. is on the verge of a mass reopening of businesses in many states.

This mad rush, most notably led by Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp (R), is fraught with the danger of new, uncontrollable surges of COVID-19. If the reopening is not done properly, there could well be tens of thousands of potentially avoidable pandemic deaths throughout the nation.

Today’s children are the pandemic generation. For millions, the future is now grim.

While we are understandably consumed with the daily, seemingly unstoppable firehose of news about the most dangerous pandemic in a century, little attention has been paid to the long-term impact of this crisis on the world's most vulnerable children.

A Candidate in Isolation: Inside Joe Biden’s Cloistered Campaign

The campaign has consulted physicians and health experts about safeguarding Mr. Biden, who at 77 falls squarely into a high-risk group for the coronavirus. Irwin Redlener, a clinical professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said he had spoken with the campaign about health precautions, including how to handle the possibility that members of Mr. Biden’s traveling staff had been exposed.

“In terms of the safety of the staff, the candidate, what did they need to know?” said Dr. Redlener, who previously served on Mr. Biden’s public health advisory committee.

The COVID-19 Death Undercount Is Scarier Than You Think

As the number of coronavirus deaths across the U.S. passed 40,000, there were emerging signs of hope: hospitalization rates were decreasing, daily death tolls were beginning to flatten, and transmission rates were seeming to slow.

But as mayors and governors, with the president’s blusterous urging, begin easing restrictions and other emergency public health measures—sending Floridians back to packed beaches this weekend, for instance—we still need a better understanding of the true number of COVID-19 deaths. Not just because having a transparent and accurate death count is critical (it is), but because it can illuminate unknown hot spots and provide critical insight into the real scope of this pandemic—and how to avoid new disaster amid the urge to resume normal life.

Governors should ignore Trump's advice until widespread testing and effective contact tracing are ready

While acknowledging (finally) that re-opening the economy and lifting some of the social distancing restrictions is not really his decision, President Donald Trump gave US governors a clear message on Thursday: time to start getting the country back to normal within the next couple of weeks.

Unfortunately, we are far from being able to do so without risking a major resurgence of Covid-19.

Even if we assume that sometime this summer — maybe June, perhaps as late as August — the first wave of Covid-19 will have tapered down, the world will likely see a second wave of the deadly virus in the fall or winter, perhaps extending into the early months of 2021.

How the Coronavirus Has Infected Our Vocabulary

We rarely watch the television, but on this first weekday morning of an eerily quiet Austin, Texas, we decided to keep it on, a portal to the wider world. Dr. Irwin Redlener, from the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said, on CNN, “We are so incredibly underprepared for a major onslaught to the hospitals, which is basically now inevitable.” Shortages of I.C.U. beds and ventilators.