Grave Shortages Of Protective Gear Flare Again As Covid Cases Surge

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Wed Jul 8, 2020, 07:17 PM - Edit history (1)

Source: The New York Times

(By Andrew Jacobs, 2 hrs ago). As coronavirus cases surge across the country, hospitals, nursing homes and private medical practices are facing a problem many had hoped would be resolved by now: a dire shortage of respirator masks, isolation gowns and disposable gloves that protect front-line medical workers from infection.

Unlike the crisis that caught a handful of big city hospitals off guard in March and April, the soaring demand for protective gear is now affecting a broad range of medical facilities across the country, a problem public health experts and major medical associations say could have been avoided if the federal government had embraced a more aggressive approach toward procuring and distributing critical supplies in the early days of the pandemic.

Doctors at Memorial City Medical Center in Houston who treat Covid-19 patients have been told to reuse single-use N95 respirator masks for up to 15 days before throwing them out. The country’s largest organization of registered nurses found in a survey of its members in late June that 85 percent had been forced to reuse disposable N95 masks while treating coronavirus patients. In Florida, some hospitals are handing out only loosefitting surgical masks to workers treating newly admitted patients who may be asymptomatic carriers.

The inability to find personal protective equipment, known as P.P.E., is starting to impede other critical areas of medicine too. Neurologists, cardiologists and cancer specialists around the country have been unable to reopen their offices in recent weeks, leaving many patients without care, according to the American Medical Association and other doctor groups...

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/grave-shortages-of-protective-gear-flare-again-as-covid-cases-surge/ar-BB16uKnj

[tanyev]

1. You want PPE? Jared knows how to get you some....if the price is right.

[soothsayer]

2. Pence basically said reuse them

[soothsayer]

3. While also saying we have a lot. Here's the quote

We also are issuing renewed guidance on preservation and reuse of PPE. Again, what we’re hearing, in not just speaking to governors but talking directly to hospitals, is that, frankly, because of the historic effort that President Trump implemented to spin up hundreds of millions of supplies of gloves and masks and face shields and — as well as the construction of ventilators — we now have 59,000 ventilators in our supplies — PPE, we hear, remains very strong, but we’re encouraging healthcare workers to begin now to use some of the best practices that we learned in other parts of the country to preserve and to reuse the PPE supplies.

[Mike 03]

4. +1

Thanks for posting.

What utterly senseless and useless gobbledygook comes from Pence's mouth. How does he not bust out laughing when he speaks like this?

[Senor Insomne]

5. And. . .

We're still more than two months away from autumn beginning.

[keithbvadu2]

6. Time for Jared/Donald to again confiscate/steal more PPE that hospitals order.

Time for Jared/Donald to again confiscate/steal more PPE that hospitals order.

And give the supplies to their friends to sell.

[paleotn]

7. That played so well the first time for Donnie...

Why not try it again?

These fucking idiots...and not just the idiot-n-chief.....actually thought this bug would roll over and go away, just because they wanted it to. It's not just political manipulation of their soft headed voters. These jackasses are just as decoupled from reality as their base.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

8. Heckuva job Trumpy

[Delmette2.0]

9. I read the first two words "Grave shortages"

and almost freaked out.

Deep breath, deep breath, deep breath.