From staff, wire reports

Mississippi could be facing a shortage of medical supplies, such as ventilators and personal protective equipment, in the coming weeks as the federal government shifts resources normally earmarked for the state to other areas of the country with higher numbers of coronavirus cases.

"There is a shortage of PPEs across the country," State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said at a news conference Friday. "Everybody wants them at the same time. And it appears pretty clear now that when the Feds started taking all PPEs and deploying them to high-risk areas, the normal supply chain dried up."

Dobbs said medical supplies normally shipped to Mississippi each month are being diverted to other states with more cases of coronavirus. It is unclear how many ventilators are in the state or how many the state is slated to get, if any.

He said the state Health Department received "a paltry amount" of supplies, which would be distributed to hospitals around the state next week.

"It's not that we're using that much more, but the stuff that used to come in regularly is no longer available."

He added the Health Department is working with FEMA and state leaders to get more resources to Mississippi.

Greg Michel, the executive director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, posted a video to social media on Saturday of staff and the Mississippi National Guard loading boxes of PPEs into trucks.

They are destined for hospitals and clinics across the state, he said, and there will be another delivery on Monday. He said the state will get more from the national stockpile "in the next couple of days."

"We are working aggressively to breakdown the stockpile of PPEs that we got and we'll be sending that out to all the nine districts in the state of Mississippi. Our efforts are to resupply the districts, not only health care workers but first responders," he said.

As of Saturday, Mississippi has reported 140 presumptive positive cases — with one death — of the coronavirus since March 11, when a Forrest County man who had traveled to Florida tested positive.

The need for ventilators and other medical supplies will continue to grow as the spread of coronavirus increases.

A USA TODAY analysis estimates 23.8 million Americans could contract COVID-19, based on an infection rate of 7.4% — similar to a mild flu year. Experts say this infection rate is likely to be far higher.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimates that 38 million Americans will need medical care for COVID-19, including as many as 9.6 million who will need to be hospitalized — about a third of whom might need ICU-level care.

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Mississippi is not alone. An Associated Press report says hospitals across the country are bracing for a possible onslaught of coronavirus patients with pneumonia and other breathing difficulties and could face a critical shortage of mechanical ventilators and health care workers to operate them.

The Society of Critical Care Medicine has projected that 960,000 coronavirus patients in the U.S. may need to be put on ventilators during the outbreak.

But the nation has only about 200,000 of the machines, by the organization's estimate, and around half are older models that may not be ideal for the most critically ill patients. Also, many ventilators are already being used by other patients with severe, non-coronavirus illnesses.

Hospitals are rushing to rent more ventilators from medical-equipment suppliers. And manufacturers are ramping up production. But whether they can turn out enough of the machines at a time when countries around the world are clamoring for them, too, is unclear.

“The real issue is how to rapidly increase ventilator production when your need exceeds the supply,” Dr. Lewis Kaplan, president of the critical care society, said Tuesday. “For that I don’t have a very good answer.”

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In the most severe cases, the coronavirus damages healthy tissue in the lungs, making it hard for them to deliver oxygen to the blood. Pneumonia can develop, along with a more severe and potentially deadly condition called acute respiratory distress syndrome, which can damage other organs.

Ventilators feed oxygen into the lungs of patients with severe respiratory problems through a tube inserted down the throat. The machines are also used routinely to help other hospital patients breathe, namely those undergoing surgery while under general anesthesia.

"If everyone in the country wants to order some, that will get rapidly depleted in a heartbeat," Kaplan said.

The other problem is that there are only enough respiratory therapists, specialist nurses and doctors with the ideal type of critical care training in the U.S. for about 135,000 patients to be put on ventilators at any one time, the critical care organization said.

Postponing non-emergency surgeries in the event of a big surge in coronavirus cases could help free up some ventilators as well as anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists to deal with the crisis, Kaplan said.

One major rental company, US Med-Equip, reported that U.S. hospitals have rented 60 percent more ventilators, monitors and other equipment over the past few weeks than at any time last year. It said it has 6,500 ventilators on rent and expects 1,200 more to arrive within the next few weeks at its Houston headquarters.

“Our team is working around the clock to provide patient-ready equipment so medical staff can focus on their lifesaving work," CEO Gurmit Singh Bhatia said in a statement.

The Tennessean and Associated Press contributed to this story.

Contact Lici Beveridge at 601-584-3104 or lbeveridge@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @licibev or Facebook at facebook.com/licibeveridge.