America deserves a COVID-19 inquiry like the one New Jersey just conducted | Mike Kelly

Asking someone to assess the impact of a deadly health pandemic surely must be the equivalent of sitting down for a tax audit only minutes after your dentist finished performing a root canal. Who would welcome such torture, especially when the news is not good?

New Jersey did. And to its credit, New Jersey, in releasing a 907-page report that details how the COVID-19 pandemic tore into the state, has performed a service for the rest of America.

More importantly, New Jersey also set an example and, in effect, threw down a challenge that has dogged the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic: Why won’t the federal government also step up and assess how COVID-19 affected the nation?

The New Jersey report, conducted by the Cherry Hill law firm of Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads, and titled “Independent Review of New Jersey’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” was released on the fourth anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration that the coronavirus was a pandemic.

More than 15 million people have died from the pandemic across the world since it began in March 2020, according to statistics compiled by the WHO. About 1.2 million of those deaths occurred in America — with 33,000 in New Jersey.

It may be too much to ask the World Health Organization to investigate the impact of COVID-19 worldwide. China, where the pandemic originated, can’t be trusted to supply accurate data. And the spread of the pandemic in, say, Somalia was far different from Sweden.

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But why can’t the United States look at its own handling of the pandemic? Yes, the American landscape is diverse — Mesquite, Texas, for instance, is definitely not Manhattan. But the public health standards are essentially similar.

Which brings us back to the New Jersey report. Why can’t the entire United States do what New Jersey did? Or, to put it differently, shouldn’t all of America — not just New Jersey — examine how this disaster unfolded and what can be done to stop the next one?

Why are we avoiding a federal COVID inquiry?

That may seem like a question that is grounded in common sense. But since the pandemic began that question has been treated as if it is a killer virus. Everyone wants to avoid it.

Soon after America began to tame the pandemic, calls went out for some sort of inquiry on why the United States was caught so flat-footed.

After all, America boasts that it has the world’s best doctors and medical researchers. It claims to have the world’s best hospitals. It routinely boasts of top-of-the-line public health standards, which are supposed to not only detect the presence of dangerous viruses but to warn everyone and quickly produce vaccines and other medical antidotes. And while our nation may not manufacture too many washing machines anymore, we’re definitely good at producing prescription drugs. Indeed, America fast-tracked the anti-COVID vaccines that held down the death toll.

One suggestion that seemed smart called for the creation of a bipartisan board, along the lines of the 9/11 Commission that former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean chaired so effectively to examine the causes and aftermath of the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001. Another was to simply ask a Congressional committee to step in.

But those proposals were quickly snuffed out or tabled. Congress was far too polarized to muster enough of its own members willing to set foot on the sort of common ground needed to conduct such a balanced and all-encompassing inquiry. As for a 9/11-style commission, no one in Congress seemed capable of actually finding a bipartisan lineup that might pass muster in such a polarized nation.

Plus — and this issue can’t be disregarded — some of the most polarized figures on each side of the political spectrum were too caught up in their own conspiracy theories about how COVID-19 not only originated but why the vaccines that were developed couldn’t be trusted to work in the first place. Conservatives were just as guilty as progressives.

'We collectively failed'

Into this void comes the New Jersey report.

Paul Zoubek, the attorney from the Montgomery-McCracken law firm who oversaw the report, did not mince words.

“We collectively failed as a nation and as a state to be adequately prepared,” he wrote in the report’s introduction.

In a nod to the heroic work of front-line nurses and doctors, he pointed out that “heroic actions were taken to respond in good faith to the crisis” and that “as the pandemic progressed, significant systemic improvements helped New Jersey mitigate the crisis.”

But when it comes to a pandemic on the scale of COVID-19, facts are facts.

“No level of effort,” Zoubek wrote, “could overcome an inadequate health care infrastructure and scarcity of basic medical supplies. Neither the state nor the federal government had clear, executable plans in place to respond to and manage such limited resources in an uncertain and rapidly evolving environment.”

Adding to the tragedy, Zoubek pointed to one family’s long arc of tragedy. During the early stages of the pandemic, this family lost both aging parents who had been living in a nursing home where the coronavirus swept through. During interviews with the surviving members of this family, health researchers discovered that their aging father who died from COVID-19 had lost his brother in 1918 during the Great Influenza pandemic.

This family, in its grief from losing both parents to COVID-19, understandably posed this set of searing questions:

“How could this have been allowed to happen? We had 100 years to learn from the 1918 pandemic that took the older brother; why weren’t we better prepared? Why didn’t we have better plans in place to deal with this pandemic?”

In some respects, the answer is obvious: America was so stuck in its polarized political swamp that its national leaders did not pay enough attention to the warnings of pandemics that scientists regularly raised.

More Mike Kelly: It's time for a COVID commission in the spirit of the 9/11 inquiry

The U.S. must plan better for public health crises

But another answer offers a more nuanced and in-depth response to the challenge faced by the nation’s public health experts — namely, that fighting a pandemic can’t be done on the spur of the moment. It requires planning.

The New Jersey report points out that the 1918 flu epidemic the poorly named "Spanish Flu" — was indeed a global killer. More than 50 million people died worldwide, 675,000 in the United States.

The impact of such mass death gave rise to America’s modern public health system. From coordinating “across different branches of government” to the standards of “effective public health communication” and the need to monitor hospital capacity and develop vaccination, infection control guidelines, along with finding common agreement on the “effectiveness of public quarantine and isolation and disease surveillance,” the United States spent much of the next 100 years crafting a top-of-the-line health system.

But it seemed to crack and creak when COVID-19 emerged. And to its credit, the New Jersey report asks a hard question: “Why we were not better prepared 100 years later, what lessons we will draw from this latest pandemic, and whether we as a nation will fare better when we are inevitably tested in the future?”

The New Jersey report devotes entire chapters to assessing the supply of masks and other protective gear for health care workers. It analyzes the ways New Jersey officials communicated information to the general public.  It considers whether business and school closures were effective.  It looks at testing, the vaccine rollout and the overall impact of the pandemic on the economy and education.

In short, the report is exhaustive — an analytical sandpile that was dropped into Trenton’s government bureaucracy.

To his credit, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy pushed for the report. This columnist has been highly critical of Murphy on occasion. But this time, Murphy deserves praise for not only supporting this kind of analysis but for making sure that it had the necessary funding — $9 million — to do the job.

Of course, it remains to be seen how Murphy and his staff will face up to the report’s central conclusion — that New Jersey is not prepared for the next pandemic.

That question could be asked of the entire nation. What’s been learned from the deaths of some 1.2 million Americans from COVID-19?

During the worst days of the coronavirus — in January 2022 — roughly 150,650 Americans were hospitalized on any given day. Today, when we are all trying to return to some sort of normalcy, some 15,000 of us are hospitalized with COVID-19 on any given day.

As if that’s not enough, on any given day nearly 7% of all adults are coping with the effects of that mysterious illness known as “long COVID.” Overall, more than 17% of all adults have been diagnosed with “long COVID” at some point in recent years.

A variety of groups have tried with some success to study the nationwide response to the COVID pandemic.  These include the so-called COVID Collaborative, which was led by the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow. The Collaborative’s national advisory council includes such bipartisan voices as former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, as well as prominent physician Ezekiel Emanuel and retired four-star U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

The group seemed like the foundation for the kind of bipartisan commission that is needed to study the COVID-19 pandemic. But Congress, which is mired in political battles over the crisis at the southern border and its attempt to impeach President Joe Biden, has yet to signal it even wants such an inquiry.

Two other notable groups — the Council on Foreign Relations and the Commonwealth Fund — also conducted inquiries into the pandemic. But as with the COVID Collaborative, those studies did not carry much weight.

For now, the New Jersey study may turn out to be the most comprehensive, objective analysis of how the coronavirus swept through one state.

Let’s hope Congress takes notice – along with the Biden administration and even the presidential campaign of Donald Trump if he can find some time between his heavy schedule of court appearances.

The point here is that our nation seems distracted right now. That’s not a good thing after 1.2 million of us died.

Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com, part of the USA TODAY Network, as well as the author of three critically acclaimed nonfiction books and a podcast and documentary film producer. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in the Northeast, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ COVID-19 review should lead to similar audit for US