As soccer fans in New York and New Jersey gear up for a summer of World Cup watch parties and try to snag last-minute tickets to games at MetLife Stadium, New York City's Health Commissioner Alister Martin is mulling potential “worst-case” scenarios:
A traveler landing at LaGuardia with a serious infectious disease.
A heat wave.
Food poisoning.
“If nothing happens, great, no problem,” Martin said on a call with Gothamist. “But we should have a plan. We should have people prepped and ready to go.”
Regional public health planning around the World Cup has been underway for the past year on a scale that city officials say is unusual even for an international metropolis where mass gatherings are routine.
More than 1 million people are expected to descend on the New York City area for the World Cup, with MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, hosting eight games from June 13 through July 19.
The planning has involved elaborate simulations of crisis scenarios, trainings for health care providers on topics such as “mass casualty” events and extensive coordination across hospitals and government agencies in New York and New Jersey.
“It’s not just one marathon that comes and goes,” said Robert Bristol, the health and medical director at NYC Emergency Management. “This is a six-week-long impact across all five boroughs and across the river in New Jersey. So it's definitely been scaled up due to the breadth and scope of the event.”
Martin said he will activate a special incident command system on June 1 that will likely extend through July, which will establish different protocols for coordinating across city agencies.
“It means we have easier lines of communication to our co-agency partners,” including NYC Emergency Management and City Hall, Martin said.
The commissioner said some city health employees are also being diverted away from their regular work to focus exclusively on preparing for and responding to public health incidents that could arise this summer.
Martin said these measures aren’t just a response to FIFA, but also the confluence of other events taking place, including America’s 250th birthday — which includes a massive naval parade up the Hudson River — and annual events such as Pride and the Puerto Rican Day Parade.
“We have a lot going on this summer,” Martin said.
In an advisory to healthcare providers on the World Cup earlier this month, the city health department said to expect “increases in heat-related illnesses, gastrointestinal illnesses, travel-related infections, sexually transmitted infections, and alcohol and substance use.”
The World Cup is taking place as city health officials monitor an Ebola outbreak in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and as measles continues to surge in parts of the United States.
Local preparations for the World Cup kicked off last June with a four-day simulation in which fictional patients with “high-consequence” infectious diseases were flown from Toronto to LaGuardia and then transported to Bellevue Hospital’s biocontainment unit to test out safety protocols. The simulation involved “more than 50 international, federal, state and local partners,” NYC Health and Hospitals announced at the time.
Other cities across the country that are hosting FIFA games ran similar drills.
Since then, there have been additional simulations for other scenarios — including what Bristol described as a “complex, coordinated attack” — and Bellevue and the Greater New York Hospital Association have held multiple FIFA-related video trainings.
Bellevue’s training on mass casualty events in March discussed scenarios that could test hospital capacity, ranging from riots to food kept at unsafe temperatures during catered events.
Martin said monitoring food vendor safety will be a top priority during the World Cup.
In some cases, preparation for the World Cup has exposed shortcomings in emergency protocols.
In New Jersey, checking the capacity of each hospital to receive patients during a large emergency has until now involved a regional center manually calling each hospital and then calling up first responders to relay that information, Jason Bhulai, director of network emergency preparedness at Hackensack Meridian Health, said during one FIFA prep call hosted by the Greater New York Hospital Association.
“About 30 minutes to an hour into that, they still don’t have all the information,” he said.
A more efficient system that establishes predetermined guidelines for where to take patients is now being put in place, according to Claudia Trani-Melgar, a spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Health.
Trani-Melgar said New Jersey’s public health planning for the World Cup involves coordination between the state health department, the New Jersey State Police and Office of Emergency Management and other federal, regional and local partners.
