FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Officials in New York and elsewhere have raised alarms about shortages of critical-care hospital space and ventilators, but Florida’s emergency management chief said Sunday the state would be able to meet the need.
He also said the state has a dedicated team of people assigned to plan for how the state should deal with the threat of a hurricane during a time of coronavirus. The Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1.
“I have full confidence that we’ll be able to meet the ICU capacity,” state Emergency Management Director Jared Moskowitz said in an interview on WPLG-Ch. 10. “We feel that we’ll be able to meet the capacity as far as the beds, or the potential bed issue, or the potential issue with ventilators.”
Asked about a projected peak need in early May of 2,500 beds and current capacity of less than 1,700, Moskowitz said the state bought, and has received 4,300 hospital beds. He said the beds the state bought, and the ability of hospitals to convert existing beds to intensive care beds, should be enough to meet the projected need.
He said field hospitals have been set up in Broward and Miami-Dade counties; field hospitals are prepositioned for Jacksonville and the Orlando area; there is capacity for 400-bed hospital to be set up at the Miami Beach Convention Center; and work is being done to reopen two shuttered facilities in Miami-Dade County.
Moskowitz said the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Health and Human Services “have been fantastic” about responding to Florida’s requests for ventilators from the strategic national supply, and the state has received four shipments.
He said there are currently more than 4,000 ventilators available in the state, and the agency is working with places such as ambulatory surgery centers to relocate some of their equipment.
“We are gathering up those resources, pre-positioning them, just like we would do in a hurricane” so they can be surged into hospitals where they’re needed. He cited South Florida as a destination. The region is the epicenter of coronavirus cases and deaths in Florida.
Hurricane season
“I’m thinking about it. I’m definitely thinking about it,” Moskowitz said on his Sunday morning interview with WPLG.
He said emergency managers started planning for how to deal with hurricane season during a pandemic almost two months ago. “Even with this pandemic, I’m not planning for tomorrow or planning for next week. I’m planning for the month after that and the month after that,” he said.
A “planning cell” has been separated from operations at the state Emergency Operations Center to concentrate on hurricane planning. Among the questions it is considering: How shelters will be operated? Will there be evacuations out of — or into — “hot zones,” depending on where a storm is headed? Will schools be used as shelters?
“These are all the things that we’re developing plans and procedures around with COVID-19,” he said. “We have to do that in the emergency management space.”
Moskowitz, a former Democratic state representative from Broward, is a former executive with disaster recovery and environmental services company, AshBritt. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis hired him to run the state emergency management agency at the beginning of 2019.
Masks
Moskowitz generated a torrent of publicity last week when he took on industrial giant 3M over the distribution of masks it manufactures.
He complained that the state has been ordering large quantities of N95 masks — the ones that offer the most protection and are essential for health workers and first responders — but authorized 3M distributors aren’t delivering, sometimes because they’re prioritizing orders that come in later, for higher prices, from foreign governments.
“There’s been one product that has been basically impossible to get ahold of,” he said. He said the state gets all sorts of stories, such as the masks are on cargo planes, but they never show up.
“There was clearly something that was wrong, all these brokers, all these lawyers representing distributors, the pricing that all over the place. … We ordered stuff a month ago, and we have not received those shipments, or we’ve received 10% of them,” Moskowitz said.
An exasperated Moskowitz highlighted the issue on Twitter, saying Sunday he decided to “troll” 3M. “That obviously struck a nerve.”
He said company representatives have reached out to the state but still haven’t provided policies for policies for how their authorized distributors should behave in such a situation.
He said DeSantis spoke by phone with the chief executive officer of 3M on Saturday. A 15-minute block was shown on the governor’s public schedule for “call with 3M CEO Mike Roman” on COVID-19. “The CEO said they’re doing everything they can,” Moskowitz said.
Moskowitz said the company emphasizes that is ramping up production of masks. “That’s great, but they haven’t shown up to Florida from the authorized 3M distributors that we’ve ordered from.”
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