Had Trump not downplayed the crisis for two months, critics say, hospitals might have been prepared for the pandemic.
From a lack of enough protective gear to fears of not having enough ventilators to worries about keeping staff healthy to financial concerns, hospitals are struggling to keep up with a “fast-moving” pandemic, according to a“Hospitals reported that their most significant challenges centered on testing and caring for patients with known or suspected COVID-19 and keeping staff safe,” the report said.
The report from HHS was self-generated, not requested by Congress. It points out that some of the issues it found are already being addressed by new guidance from HHS and the $2 trillion emergency legislation passed by lawmakers last month. Perhaps the single biggest problem was “severe shortages of testing supplies and extended waits for test results,” the report found. And the testing shortage, in turn, exacerbated other problems, such as the shortage of personal protective equipment, or PPE — including masks, gloves and face shields.
The testing shortfall is also forcing hospitals to tie up precious beds with patients who wind up not having COVID-19 as well as sidelining staff who show symptoms but who also cannot quickly find out for sure if they have the virus. Hospitals also complained that supplies they were getting from the national and state reserves were absurdly insufficient — “won’t even last a day,” said one — but were sometime unusable because of their age. Others said that the lack of a coherent national response had hospitals bidding against each other as well as members of the public.
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