Some states and cities that have been shipped masks, gloves, ventilators and other essential equipment from the nation’s medical stockpile to fight the coronavirus have gotten an unwelcome surprise: the material is unusable.
Tony Miller, Yakima County emergency management director; Horace Ward, operations manager of Yakima Valley Office of Emergency Management; and Blake Scully, a resource supply officer, fromleft, evaluate how many ventilators arrived from the weekly supply shipment Thursday, April 2, 2020, at the Yakima County Office of Emergency Management in Union Gap, Wash.
“Several of the shipments we have received from the strategic national stockpile contained well past expiration dates and, while we are being told much of the expired equipment is capable of being used for COVID-19 response, they would not be suitable for use in surgical settings,” Charles Boyle, a spokesman for Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, said in an email.
Numerous governors have complained about delays in getting equipment from the Strategic National Stockpile or receiving amounts of gear far below what they had requested. That frustration is compounded when equipment arrives, but can’t be used. “It’s really alarming because those masks are desperately needed,” said U.S. Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama. “When our national stockpile is not monitored enough to know that you’ve got expired masks and rotted masks out there and not replenished, that is a real problem.”
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