A pandemic influenza outbreak could take a terrible toll on our communities. Our preparedness focuses on four goals. The overarching goal is to limit illness and death. The others, are to preserve continuity of government, minimize social disruption, and minimize economic loss. You can’t have a perfect balance of all those things, but we’re keeping all of them in mind in our planning.

The reality we’re facing is that there will be no way to fully prevent illness and death. We’re working closely with the health-care community to assess our capacity to respond to a flu pandemic. How many hospital beds, physicians, exam rooms, and consulting nurses do we have? What are all the health-care resources that we have in our county, and how can we think about them in a different way to respond to a health crisis? Thinking through all of those aspects, how we might reconfigure our resources in a pandemic flu crisis? What are the gaps we’ll have to address?

We must keep core government services operating — like police, fire, utilities, transportation — to maintain essential services for everyone in our communities. In a pandemic, people will be more dependent on government that ever, and we need to ensure that we will have the plans in place and staff identified to deliver and sustain the services that will keep people safe and our community functioning.

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