As the pandemic commenced its spread across America in early 2020, health care providers nationwide scrambled to ramp up an effective response. Yet this wasn't the first emerging virus that local hospitals had dealt with in recent years. Existing institutional, professional, and governmental pandemic guidelines assured health care providers weren't caught flat-footed as they learned more about this latest threat.
“When the CDC opened their incident command for COVID-19 in January 2020, we in infection prevention took that as an alert for us to respond,” says Christine Zirges, director of infection prevention for SSM Health. “We captured
