These efforts to expand the postal pilot to a national scale make the logistical plans, lessons learned, and areas for future work identified by workshop participants even more important and relevant to national medical countermeasures dispensing efforts.
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Logistics
In the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, there are 205,000 residences with an estimated 2.8 persons per home. That equals 575,000 persons who need to be covered within 20 zip codes. Within those zip codes, there are nine consolidated delivery units (also known as post offices or carrier annexes). The Minneapolis Postal Service determined that, by having each postal carrier who volunteers cover two normal postal routes, 179 volunteers can deliver medication to the entire 575,000 people within 8 to 9 hours. For security, one security officer would be assigned to each carrier, plus additional security for the consolidated delivery units that have been activated.
“The postal plan is not mandated for our employees; it is a volunteer program response to a wide-scale anthrax attack. From the start—from the very origin of this plan—it was recognized these had to be volunteers,” said Jude Plessas, manager of the CRI Postal Plan Program. The project currently has 385 qualified volunteers in Minneapolis–St. Paul—311 carriers and 74 from management. This is 80 percent more than what is needed in terms of carriers to cover the project area.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53124/