The billions of tax dollars headed for hospitals and states as part of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus response bill won't fix the problem facing doctors and nurses: a critical shortage of protective gowns, gloves and masks.
FILE - In this March 12, 2020, file photo, health care personnel test a person in the passenger seat of a car for coronavirus at a Kaiser Permanente medical center parking lot in San Francisco. The Associated Press has found that the critical shortage of testing swabs, protective masks, surgical gowns and hand sanitizer can be tied to a sudden drop in imports of medical supplies.
For more than a week, governors have pushed back against administration assurances that supplies are available now, bitterly complaining to President Donald Trump that there's no coordination. “The coronavirus is spreading at an unbelievable rate so you can only expect the demand for personal protective equipment and other medical supplies to follow the same trajectory, which is scary given that there is already a massive shortage of such items at hospitals,” said Wowak.
Now that bottleneck has tightened as the pandemic sweeps through the world, shuttering potential backup factories from one country to the next. Many manufacturers have been ordered to shut down or limit production throughout Southeast Asia and Latin America, including in India and Mexico. In Malaysia, where 75 percent of the world’s medical gloves are made, AP found factories were shut down and only allowed to reopen with half staff, who are now locked in hostels at their workplaces.
“Wearing the same mask from patient to patient to patient, what are you doing? Are we taking care of them or putting them at greater risk?” she said. Six weeks ago, the Center for Global Development warned that the U.S. should get ready to rapidly scale-up medical supply manufacturing. Minnesota’s 3M Co. was already ramping up, but only in the past week have many others followed.
“The real challenge is not having a clear dashboard-like function that can help match demand and supply. Just infusing more cash doesn’t create that,” he said Friday.
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