Environmental Science in the Time of Coronavirus

So I totally didn’t expect to be writing a post on the coronavirus.  But for many of us the Covid-19 pandemic caught us off guard and has changed the way we go about our daily business.  Nothing is insulated from Covid-19 not even the environmental field. 

For most of us, our lives will be disrupted like everyone else; working and studying at home and limiting trips in hope we don’t catch and/or spread the virus.  But in the environmental field it is hard to stay indoors when the environment is well outdoors. I know many companies, universities, and agencies have restricted travel to protect their employees.  I was at a conference last week and half of the speakers didn’t show up because of the travel restrictions. 

But you can only restrict travel so much in the environmental field without seriously hurting your operations.  If the company has strict travel restrictions, how will you perform field sampling? Without the samples there is no data, no data there is no data analysis, no data analysis there are no reports, no reports means no progress is made on a project.  Workflow may slow down significantly for many. 

On the flip side, not everyone is seeing a slow down.  Take me for example. I am an environmental scientist in a local government agency.  As part of my duties, I am on the emergency hazmat response team which requires federal emergency response training.  The local government agency I work for is also the local public health agency. Now you can guess what I’m about to say next? Yup, that’s right, I am now on our local Covid response team.  Last Thursday I walked into the office and I was told that I have been “conscripted” into the response team. I had until lunch to “put my affairs in order” then my one and only job is to serve on the response team. 

Until I get relieved or the virus dies down I am unable to perform my environmental job duties.  Even my manager has stated that I should only spend at most an hour a week working on my actual job because my focus should be on the virus.  That is assuming I will have the energy to do so since we are running operations 24/7. And I’m sure I’m not the only environmental scientist that was “conscripted” to aid in the virus response around the country.  How many more environmental departments had to stop or slow down their operations to aid in the virus response? 

I am very interested to see how things develop over the next few months.  This is an unprecedented event and will have major impacts on our society.  How many lives will be lost? How will jobs and the economy be affected? What impacts will this have on the environment.  We will just have to wait and see as this all unfolds.