What happens when natural disasters strike during a pandemic?

But another risk lurked in the throng of people: the novel coronavirus, which had already started ramping up in the region.A 5.3-magnitude earthquake shook the Croatian capital of Zagreb on March 22, 2020, damaging buildings and cutting electricity in a number of neighborhoods.The quake in Croatia was one of the earliest wake-up calls for people around the world that natural hazards still loom large during the COVID-19 pandemic, including floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and even volcanic eruptions.The risk is particularly acute in the United States, which now leads the global case count with roughly 640,000 confirmed ill. Already this week, tornadoes tore through the southeastern United States, killing at least 34 people and leaving more than half a million without electricity.“Disasters don’t stop for a virus,” says Craig Fugate, former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).Still, experts stress that people living in disaster-prone regions are not helpless. But people at every level of the response system are facing fallout from the pandemic.“There’s really nothing about how we respond to a disaster that is not in some way impacted by COVID-19,” says Samantha Montano, an assistant professor in the University of Nebraska Omaha’s emergency management and disaster science program.The state of Tennessee serves as a potent example of the steep challenges communities face. The next morning, the community response was swift and sweeping.“We had literally a mile of cars that were either people coming to volunteer or people coming to drop stuff off,” says Tina Doniger, the executive director for the Community Resource Center (CRC) of Tennessee, a Nashville-based nonprofit that collects and distributes goods during emergencies.