John-Martin Lowe, PhD, discussing preparing to receive the first COVID-19 patients

27 March 2023

John-Martin Lowe: [I]n the COVID response and my initial roles and responsibilities, again, because I had been so involved in transport, got pulled into how do we do a lot of the local coordination and integration with federal organizations for receiving patients that are going to need to be provided medical care or monitored. So, a fair amount of liaising and pulling together those organizations here in Omaha that do all of the planning and do the piece to get people safely to the airport and from the airport to wherever they're going. Also very involved in kind of rewriting protocols. So, we have lots of protocols for viral hemorrhagic diseases. We had a variety of protocols for respiratory pathogens but, knowing what we knew and knowing what we didn't know in February of 2020, we really—it was a great opportunity to refine our protocols based off of the current body of information, or lack thereof, to kind of maximize safety. So, it was prepping for transport and doing a final deep dive on our safety protocols for the initial response where it was—we were so integrated and embedded with federal agencies, it was really just helping make sure that the federal agencies had the information that they needed and a lot of coordination on behalf of the biocontainment unit with different federal agencies that thought they might have somebody that would need to come to the biocontainment unit.

From the McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives