An emergency action plan to combat a pandemic existed in New Jersey at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, but it was little known within the senior ranks of state government, an oversight that helped contribute to an inadequate response to the virus, a state review concluded.
The 910-page report, released on March 7, 2024, said the state Department of Health created a Pandemic Influenza Plan in 2015 that accurately described what actually happened during the COVID-19 pandemic and outlined detailed steps to combat the virus. Officials, however, were not familiar with it and those tasked with dealing with an outbreak were never trained in implementing the plan.
The report, conducted by the law firm of Montgomery, McCracken, Walker and Rhoads, concluded that “emergency plans do no good if those plans are put on a shelf and forgotten.”
Initial confusion about how the virus was spread contributed to the uneven response to COVID-19, with officials first claiming infections resulted from touching surfaces where the virus had been transmitted, rather than through droplets in the air.
“But even if health authorities had known about aerosol spread, there was another more fundamental problem: a grossly insufficient supply of personal protective equipment–facemasks, gowns and gloves,” the report stated. “For all practical purposes, New Jersey’s personal protective equipment stockpiles were insufficient. On top of that, the breakdown in the global supply chain prevented quick acquisition of additional supplies.”
The issue of adequate supplies of PPE was a major concern for New Jersey’s funeral directors who were often operating with razor-thin amounts of the equipment while dealing with an overwhelming volume of cases. In April 2020, for example, 17,936 New Jersey residents died, nearly triple the number of previous Aprils. In total, more than 33,000 New Jerseyans have died of COVID-19 or coronavirus-related causes and more than 3 million positive cases have been recorded. During the initial months of the pandemic, New Jersey had the second-worst death rate in the nation.
The problem of PPE supplies became so severe that the New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association went to extraordinary lengths to secure equipment for funeral directors and distributed it directly and through district organizations.
The United States relied on global supply chains of PPE to provide the stockpiles needed for healthcare facilities, funeral homes and other entities, the report said. In 2019, investigators concluded, 70 percent of PPE supplies came from China. But the chain quickly broke down as global demand soared, and stockpiles in the U.S. and New Jersey specifically were insufficient for the increased need.
The report outlines several recommendations to ensure a standing supply of PPE in future pandemics and other emergencies. They include:
- Maintaining a donation portal for critical goods
- Signing emergency contracts now to ensure access later
- Building better supply chains, possibly in conjunction with other Northeast states
- Creating and managing stockpiles
Those steps were among a total of 33 recommendations the report made to establish a better response system for future outbreaks.
The plight of funeral service during the pandemic was indirectly addressed in the report, which mentioned mortuaries in relation to the large number of deaths during the early months of COVID-19.
“Nobody can forget the sight of refrigerated containers used as temporary morgues, let alone corpses stacked in piles, due to mortuaries being overwhelmed with the number of New Jerseyans who died in the first wave of the pandemic,” the report said. “Effective preparedness is essential to avoiding a similar situation in the future.”
The report stressed the government’s myopia when it came to being prepared for both the COVID-19 pandemic and future emergencies.
“One comment we frequently heard in interviews was that ‘Nobody saw this coming,’” the report stated. “While it is true that COVID-19 was a never-before-seen disease, New Jersey–and the rest of the world–had been through pandemics and large-scale infectious diseases before and knew how vital it was to prepare for the next one.”