New Jersey Governor’s Report Shares COVID Response Lessons Learned

The state of New Jersey “did many things right in its response to COVID-19,” Governing’s Carl Smith recently wrote.

Still, as a new 910-page, independent report points out, there is much that the state could have done better. Though the state of New Jersey certainly doesn’t stand alone in that regard.

“We collectively failed as a nation and as a state to be adequately prepared. At the state level, heroic actions were taken to respond in good faith to the crisis,” wrote Paul H. Zoubek, partner with Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads, the Cherry Hill, N.J.-based law firm that produced the report.

As the pandemic progressed, for instance, “significant systemic improvements helped New Jersey mitigate the crisis, but no level of effort could overcome an inadequate healthcare,” Zoubek wrote.

“But no level of effort could overcome an inadequate healthcare 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.”

Recently released by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, the report is the first to examine a specific state’s response to the COVID emergency, and details how New Jersey government maintained operations during the pandemic, including the sudden shift to remote work and the subsequent return to in-person work.

“On March 21, 2020, when [Gov. Murphy] announced that all non-essential government employees would have to transition to remote work, each agency needed to acquire proper equipment for employees and set up remote access to government servers without having to physically be in the office,” the report read. “However, agencies started at different levels of readiness and had to adapt accordingly. Although some agencies transitioned to remote work in a relatively smooth manner, many agencies struggled and overcame significant obstacles.”

Tech Troubles

Technological challenges hampered many of those organizations, according to the report.

“In general, New Jersey’s agencies struggled to provide services remotely due to complications with technology, which caused notable delays in service delivery.”

In agencies that found themselves unprepared for remote work on such a scale, IT departments “had to modernize the IT infrastructure and migrate systems toward cloud-based solutions,” the report continued, noting that the New Jersey Office of Information (NJOIT) often assisted with the necessary updates.

“Importantly, NJOIT set up remote access tools to ensure that state employees could securely log onto state systems from home. While there were challenges in providing remote access to such a large number of employees at once, NJOIT was prepared to scale remote access quickly as it foresaw a potential need for remote work in early March [2020] and had already completed stress tests.”

Acquiring the technology needed to enable government employees to work remotely was only half the battle, as the report noted that many agencies found workers required extensive training on how to use these new systems. For example, employees at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) were accustomed to working on desktop computer systems and relying on in-office telephonic communications, according to the report.

“As a result, NJDEP’s staff struggled to quickly gain familiarity with remote access tools and the new flow of remote operations. To address these challenges, NJDEP offered frequent training on Microsoft Teams and Remote Access.”

As the report pointed out, many agencies expected to be working fully remotely for no more than two or three weeks.

“It soon became clear, however, that the public health emergency would last into summer 2020 and beyond, leading agencies to develop protocols to slowly guide employees back to in-person work.”

While many agencies turned to existing policies on, say, room capacity and room cleaning protocols to help guide their return-to-work strategy, they also adjusted these protocols to accommodate the higher numbers of employees that would now be in the office, read the report, adding that Gov. Murphy’s office and the New Jersey Department of Health (NJDOH) assisted agencies in crafting their return-to-work procedures, such as face covering and social distancing measures, building maintenance and cleaning and modifications to workplace layouts, for instance.

In his introduction, Zoubek expressed hope that the report holds lessons for government workplaces going forward.

“We hope that the report can serve as a playbook for New Jersey—a guide to putting in place the appropriate resources, plans and processes—so that we can all be better prepared for the next major crisis. Let us learn from this horrific experience today so we can avoid another one tomorrow.”