Last month as the country struggled to defend itself from the coronavirus, some critics were asking where the Federal Emergency Management Agency was and why is wasn’t working overtime to assist a nation amid the pandemic. “While our national response has dramatically improved since FEMA took charge
Last month as the country struggled to defend itself from the coronavirus, some critics were asking where the Federal Emergency Management Agency was and why is wasn’t working overtime to assist a nation amid the pandemic.
Then, on March 18, FEMA was designated the “lead federal agency,” enabling it to coordinate with federal and private partners to get supplies, equipment and drugs where they needed to go – as fast as possible. Tune into ABC at 1 p.m. ET and ABC News Live at 4 p.m. ET every weekday for special coverage of the novel coronavirus with the full ABC News team, including the latest news, context and analysis.
“FEMA got placed in this after decisions were already made,” Fugate said. “They had a lot of things to get caught up on.” The FEMA-chartered flights loaded with PPE are part of Project Air Bridge, a modernized, medical version of the Cold War-era Berlin Airlift, and cited frequently at the daily White House coronavirus task force briefings.
From the moment the Project Air Bridge flight landed at O’Hare until the PPE reaches customers in need takes less than a week, according to a Medline spokesman, citing their massive distribution system which relies on a network of warehouses across the country. The governors of Michigan and Maryland, in a March 30 op-ed for the Washington Post, claimed the lack of coordination is creating “a counterproductive competition between states and the federal government.”
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