Failures ‘unmasked’
City unprepared for pandemic, says Scott
The de Blasio administration was woefully unprepared for a pandemic when COVID broke out last year and its response lagged as the risks became clear, according to a scathing new report from city Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office.
The city was caught so offguard that officials didn’t even know its supply of surgical-grade N95 masks had expired years earlier until it began looking for them in February 2020, stated the report released Wednesday.
“Our investigation shows weaknesses in planning and preparation and failures to promptly make decisions when time was of the essence and every minute counted,” Stringer said in a statement.
The report comes after Mayor de Blasio’s clashes with his own Health Department came to public light last year, leading to former Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot’s August 2020 resignation.
But the document shows the dysfunction went far beyond one city agency.
Back in February 2020, as the Big Apple braced for the arrival of COVID, an official at the city’s Office of Emergency Management began asking about the city stockpile of N95 masks.
“How many N95 masks do we have in our stockpile?” the unnamed official was quoting as writing in Stringer’s report. “Can we order more? Or is there a national shortage?”
Not only should the city already have known the extent of its personal protective equipment stockpiles, according to Stringer; the answer to the official’s question proved to be cause for major concern.
“[U]nfortunately the overall picture is that New York City doesn’t have any nonexpired medical-grade [surgical N95] masks in its stockpiles,” an unnamed official later wrote.
Surgical N95 masks are fluid-resistant and provide the greatest possible protection, according to the report.
In the following weeks, the city joined in the nationwide scramble for personal protective equipment, with de Blasio launching a partnership in which masks and other supplies were assembled by hand in Brooklyn. The lack of personal protective equipment also reportedly led to fighting between Barbot and a top NYPD official for masks.
At a Wednesday news conference, de Blasio rejected the criticism in the report.
“There’s no way to fully understand a global pandemic until you’re in it,” he said. “None [of] us anticipated anything like this.”
Stringer’s analysis also delves into the bureaucracy of pandemic preparedness.
Rejecting de Blasio’s statements that there was no way to foresee the COVID crisis, the report notes that as far back as 2006, the city outlined goals for how to respond to a pandemic.
But a key next step — detailing how the city’s massive government apparatus should achieve those goals — was never completed, Stringer’s office found.
By the start of the pandemic, “the city faced COVID-19 with only a plan to make a plan, instead of an updated citywide operational response guide,” the report stated.
Last year, Barbot accused the mayor of icing out health experts and ignoring her own warnings that COVID could cause a huge death toll, allegations Hizzoner rejected.
Stringer voiced hope the city can still learn from its errors.
“We will never forget who and what we lost, and we cannot erase the mistakes of the past,” he stated. “But we can make sure we are better prepared for future emergencies and the next pandemic.”