Tennessee confirmed its first case of COVID-19 today. A Williamson County man who recently traveled to a conference in Boston tested positive, and the Tennessee Department of Health activated its emergency response protocols within hours. Governor Bill Lee held a press conference urging calm.
Calm is not the word security company owners across the state would use to describe their morning.
Phone calls started before sunrise. Clients wanted to know what their guard companies were doing about the virus. Were guards being screened? Did they have masks? What happens if a guard gets sick on their property? Nobody had good answers, because nobody has dealt with this before. Not at this scale. Not with this much uncertainty.
The Immediate Fallout
Three things happened in rapid succession over the past 48 hours as news of the virus spreading across the U.S. dominated every headline.
First, event security contracts started falling apart. The NCAA tournament is in two weeks, and Nashville was supposed to host first and second-round games at Bridgestone Arena. That contract alone represents six figures in revenue for the security companies staffing the event. Nobody has canceled it officially. Yet. The conversations are happening, though, and the security firms holding those contracts know what’s coming.
Corporate events, conferences, and trade shows are canceling or postponing across Middle Tennessee. A security company owner in Nashville told me this morning that he lost three event contracts totaling $42,000 in the past week. “That revenue is just gone,” he said. “It’s not delayed. Nobody is rescheduling a March conference to April when nobody knows what April looks like.”
Second, healthcare facility security went from a steady business to an urgent one overnight. Hospitals in Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville are adding guards at entrances to screen visitors. Some facilities are setting up external triage tents and need security for those as well. Vanderbilt University Medical Center posted emergency requests for additional security staffing. Regional One Health in Memphis did the same.
The problem: healthcare security requires trained, experienced guards who can handle volatile situations. You can’t pull someone from a warehouse post and put them at an ER entrance. The guards with healthcare experience are already working, and the facilities that need more of them are competing for a limited pool.
Third, nobody can find personal protective equipment. PPE has become the three-letter acronym that every security company owner in Tennessee learned this week. Surgical masks, N95 respirators, disposable gloves, hand sanitizer: all of it is either sold out or being hoarded by hospitals and government agencies.
A Memphis security company owner told me she tried to order 500 surgical masks from her usual supplier on Monday. The supplier laughed. “They said they had a six-week backlog and couldn’t guarantee delivery,” she said. “Six weeks. My guards need masks now, not in April.”
What Guards Are Dealing With
Talk to the guards themselves, and you hear a different kind of anxiety. These are people earning $11 to $15 per hour, most of them without employer-provided health insurance. The companies that do offer insurance typically provide high-deductible plans that leave guards responsible for thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.
A guard working at a downtown Nashville office building told me he’d been given a bottle of hand sanitizer and told to wipe down the lobby desk every two hours. No mask. No gloves. No training on infection control procedures. “My supervisor sent a text that said wash your hands a lot. That’s the guidance,” he said.
At a Memphis retail location, guards are being asked to interact with every person entering the store. Count heads, check for shoplifters, deal with confrontational customers. Now add the possibility that any of those people could be carrying a virus that’s killing people in Washington state.
The industry’s staffing problem, already severe before this week, is about to get worse. Guards who feel unsafe will quit. Guards who get sick will be off the schedule for at least two weeks. And recruiting new guards into a job that now carries an infectious disease risk, at $12 per hour, is going to be a much harder sell.
What Companies Are Doing (and Not Doing)
Responses from Tennessee security companies range from aggressive to nonexistent.
Some companies moved fast. One Nashville firm distributed thermometers to all supervisors with instructions to check guard temperatures at the start of every shift. Any guard with a fever above 100.4 gets sent home. They ordered PPE from an industrial supplier in January, before the shortage hit, and have enough masks and gloves to last about three weeks.
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. “We’re following CDC guidelines,” said the operations director of a mid-size company with offices in Chattanooga and Knoxville. When I asked what those guidelines meant in practical terms for his guards, he paused for several seconds. “We told them to wash their hands and stay home if they feel sick.” That was it.
The honesty is appreciated, if not the preparation. Most security companies in Tennessee are small operations, 20 to 100 guards, running on thin margins. They don’t have risk management departments. They don’t have stockpiles of PPE. They don’t have pandemic response plans because, until last month, a pandemic was something from history books and disaster movies.
A few of the larger companies are developing written policies. One firm circulated a memo to clients outlining their COVID response: daily health screenings for guards, enhanced cleaning protocols at guard posts, procedures for isolating a guard who develops symptoms on duty, and contact notification processes. The memo was professional and thorough. Whether the company can actually execute all of it with its current resources is a separate question.
The Client Pressure
Clients are adding their own layer of complexity. Commercial property managers want guards to enforce new building protocols: limiting elevator occupancy, directing foot traffic, monitoring hand sanitizer stations. That’s security theater more than security work, and some company owners are frustrated by it.
“I have a client who wants my guards to wipe down door handles every 30 minutes,” said one Nashville operator. “That’s not security. That’s janitorial work. I’m not going to repurpose a $14-an-hour guard to be a cleaning person because my client doesn’t want to pay a cleaning company.”
The tension between what clients want and what security companies can reasonably provide is going to grow as the situation escalates. Guards are trained to observe, report, and deter criminal activity. They’re not trained in infection control, and they shouldn’t be positioned as public health enforcers. The liability implications of a security company promising its guards can prevent disease spread are staggering.
Healthcare clients are different. Hospitals understand infection control, and their security teams (both in-house and contract) operate under established clinical protocols. The challenge there is volume, not competence. Hospitals need more guards than they currently have, and they need them trained to a healthcare standard that takes weeks, not days.
What Nobody Knows
The honest assessment is that nobody in Tennessee’s security industry knows what happens next. The virus has been in the U.S. for about six weeks. Tennessee has one confirmed case. The governor says the risk to the general public remains low.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe this burns out in a few weeks, the NCAA tournament goes on as planned, and we all look back at this as an overreaction. That’s a real possibility, and some company owners are betting on it.
The other possibility is that this gets much worse. Italy locked down entire regions last week. Washington state is dealing with outbreaks in nursing homes. If Tennessee sees community spread, the cascading effects on the security industry will be severe: guards calling out sick, clients shutting down facilities, event cancellations across the board, and revenue losses that small companies can’t absorb.
Hospital security will boom regardless. Warehouse and distribution center security will likely hold steady; those facilities don’t close easily. Retail security could go either way, depending on consumer behavior. Event security is already taking hits that won’t be recovered this quarter.
Practical Steps for Right Now
For security companies trying to navigate this week, a few concrete suggestions:
Get PPE now, even at inflated prices. Industrial supply companies still have some stock. Buy masks, gloves, and sanitizer today. Tomorrow may be too late.
Write a pandemic response plan, even a basic one. Include protocols for guard health screening, procedures if a guard tests positive, client notification processes, and PPE distribution. A written plan, even an imperfect one, is better than nothing.
Talk to your insurance carrier. Ask specifically whether your general liability and workers’ compensation policies cover pandemic-related claims. Get the answer in writing. Don’t assume.
Communicate proactively with clients. Don’t wait for them to call and ask what you’re doing. Send a brief, honest update explaining your preparations and your limitations. Clients will remember which companies communicated early and which ones went silent.
Review your financial reserves. If this disruption lasts more than a few weeks, cash flow will tighten. Event security companies should be especially cautious about making commitments they can’t fund if April and May revenue disappears.
Tennessee’s security industry has dealt with floods, ice storms, tornadoes, and economic recessions. This is something new. The companies that survive it will be the ones that moved early, communicated honestly, and took care of their guards before worrying about their margins. How many of Tennessee’s 400-plus security firms will do that remains an open question.
We’ll have more answers next week. For now, the only honest thing to say is: pay attention, prepare for the worst, and hope it doesn’t come to that.