Understanding Resilience: The Impact of COVID-19

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In early 2020, Jessecae MarshDominic Packer and a team within Lehigh’s Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy (I-CPIE) were preparing to explore how human perception of recovery relates to community recovery from a natural disaster. The team had begun collecting metrics of infrastructure recovery for the areas of North Carolina affected in 2018 by Hurricane Florence, such as information about internet- and power-grid usage. The researchers then planned to conduct online surveys and in-person focus groups to ask affected individuals about their personal perceptions of their region’s recovery. 

A global pandemic changed their plans. As COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, spread far and wide, killing thousands and disrupting daily life around the world, the team quickly pivoted.

“At the end of May we were scheduled to do in-person focus groups in North Carolina, and we were building all the capacity for that,” says Marsh, an associate professor of psychology. “[As the pandemic] started to unfold, we were still thinking, ‘What's going to happen?’ No one on this team wanted to go down to do focus groups in May, and we didn’t think it was responsible to be doing them. Also, we were concerned that with online data collection—if we're asking people to think about their experience of a disaster when there's another unfolding disaster—everything will be skewed in that data collection.”

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