Letter to the Hon. Peter T. Gaynor Administrator Federal Emergency Management Agency - Baldwin & Pocan to FEMA: "We Need Better Emergency Management for Wisconsin Now."

Letter

Thank you for the assistance the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has provided to the state of Wisconsin during the COVID-19 pandemic. FEMA's support has been critical to our ability to effectively respond to this crisis, which is why we write to express our concern about the amount and usability of the medical and testing supplies FEMA has delivered to Wisconsin.

At the request of Region V FEMA Administrator James Joseph, Wisconsin's Governor sent an updated letter to FEMA on April 30, 2020 laying out the state's request for supplies to combat the COVID-19 crisis including N95 masks, medical gowns, gloves and testing supplies. Please see the table attached to this letter outlining what Wisconsin has requested and what it has received over the last month.

While FEMA has provided significant materials including over 358,600 N-95 masks, 159,000 medical gloves, and thousands of surgical masks to Wisconsin, in some cases the quantity of supplies received is far less than what the state requested. For instance, Wisconsin has requested 273,631 surgical gowns but has received none. Last week, the state had less than one week's worth of medical gowns on hand. More than two months into this national emergency, this is unacceptable.
We also have serious concerns with the usability of some of swabs and viral transport tubes FEMA shipped to Wisconsin. On May 11 , the President announced a plan to provide weekly shipments of swabs and viral transport tubes to each state for their testing needs for May and June. While this was extremely welcome news, we recently learned that a majority of the swabs and transport vials shipped to Wisconsin are unusable. For example, 17,000 saline tubes are too short to transport the nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs used for the majority of COVID-19 tests, and 67,983 foam applicators cannot be used for NP swabs. More than 60 days into a national emergency, these mistakes cannot continue to be made -- they will cost human lives.

In addition to these concerns, we remain frustrated by the lack of support for clinical and private labs in Wisconsin, including a serious need for reagents from the federal government. FEMA has blanketly declined to support the state's request for any testing supplies, other than swabs, and referred Wisconsin to the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) International Reagent Resource (IRR). This is not an adequate response. The CDC will only support supplies for Wisconsin's two state public health labs, yet the majority of labs conducting COVID-19 tests are clinical or private labs experiencing severe shortages of reagents. This is a concern we have heard from colleagues around the country. Therefore, we urge you to reconsider FEMA's role in supporting the stability of the reagent supply chain to ensure states can safely re-open and implement the President's National Testing Plan recommendation to have each state conducting diagnostic tests on at least two percent of their population this month.

Again, thank you for your work to help our nation combat COVID-19. We urge you to immediately provide surgical gowns to Wisconsin, and to ensure that the weekly shipments of swabs and vials being shipped to Wisconsin for testing capacity are actually useable for COVID- 19 diagnostic tests.

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