U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Intergovernmental Affairs
Please see the advisory below from our partners in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) regarding an update on the Whole-of-America response to COVID-19.
April 15, 2020
FEMA Advisory
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Whole-of-America Response
Attached you will find today’s FEMA Daily Briefing Points for the Whole-of-America response to coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. These briefing points include Topline Messages, as well as Supply Chain Task Force; By the Numbers; FEMA and Department of Health and Human Services Response; and Guidance from Federal Agencies.
Topline messaging includes:
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FEMA, HHS, and our federal partners work with state, local, tribal and territorial governments to execute a whole-of-America response to COVID-19 pandemic and protect the health and safety of the American people.
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FEMA continues to expedite movement of commercially pre-sourced and commercially procured critical supplies from the global market to medical distributors in various locations across the U.S. through FEMA Project Airbridge.
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HHS and FEMA deployment of ventilators from the stockpile have helped ensure that hospitals in states such as New York have not run out of ventilator capacity while working to save lives.
- The federal government has adopted a process to manage allocation of federal ventilator resources to ensure the right number of ventilators are shipped to the right states to sustain life within a 72-hour window.
- Emergency managers and public health officials submit requests for ventilators to FEMA/HHS, providing detailed data on total medical/hospital beds; total acute care (ICU) beds; normal occupancy; predicted surge occupancy; and number of ventilators available in the state.
- States can send requests outside of the 72-hour window for consideration by the federal government; allocation decisions and/or shipments, however, should not be expected until the state is within the immediate 72-hour window.
- Hospital administrators across the country are being asked to provide daily reports on testing, capacity, supplies, utilization, and patient flows to facilitate the ongoing public health response.
- The seven new ventilator contracts announced by HHS this month will supply 6,190 ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile by May 8 and 29,510 by June 1.
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HHS and FEMA have expanded the items supplied by the International Reagent Resource (IRR) to help public health labs access diagnostics supplies and reagents for COVID-19 testing free of charge.
- Consolidating testing supplies under the IRR simplifies the resource request process for states and territories and alleviates the burden on public health labs of the need to work with separate, individual suppliers for swabs, reagents and other diagnostic testing supplies.
- The expanded list of diagnostic supplies will include supplies to support the three components needed for COVID-19 testing: sample kits, extraction kits and test kits.
Follow Us
Follow FEMA on social media at: FEMA online, on Twitter @FEMA or @FEMAEspanol, on FEMA Facebook page or FEMA Espanol page and at FEMA YouTube channel.
Also, follow Administrator Pete Gaynor on Twitter @FEMA_Pete.
FEMA Mission
To help people before, during and after disasters.
https://www.esca.org/wp-content/uploads/ESF15_DailyBriefingPoints_20200415_FINAL.pdf