Running out of supplies for healthcare workers during the Covid-19 pandemic is a constant anxiety. And a rush for masks and gowns isn’t helping

US hospitals fall back on billionaires to make up for shortfall in protective equipment

Tiffany Love is the chief operating officer of a small hospital in Winnemucca, Nevada, a rural town closer to the California’s redwoods than the Las Vegas strip. Twenty-six people in Winnemucca have Covid-19, three of whom are in Love’s hospital.

While Love has enough personal protective equipment for her nurses right now, the possibility of running out of supplies is a constant anxiety. One supplier offered her a deal “direct from 3M”, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of high-quality N95 masks.

There was one catch: she had to buy 10m masks at $5.20 each.

“We’re desperate, we want to get PPE for our staff, but these are insane requests,” she said. “We’re a 25-bed community hospital, when will we ever use 10 million masks? Probably not in 10 years.”

A lack of protective equipment for staff has become a crisis within the pandemic without a cohesive federal response. But while small and public hospitals across the country struggle to obtain masks and gowns for their staff, billionaire board members of large medical centers have called in favors, and states are relying on wealthy philanthropists to close the gap.

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Previously, Donald Trump told states they were on their own, and the federal government was a “back up.” Then, Fema began intercepting some shipments ordered by states. Experts said the “piecemeal” approach continues to drive up the cost of supplies, leaving smaller or less wealthy hospitals outgunned and wasting precious manpower on acquisition, a symptom of federal failure.

“I don’t think it’s inappropriate for them to turn to other sources, but it’s just tragic that’s what they’ve had to resort to because our federal government has failed so dramatically,” said Dr Michael Carome, a director with the public interest advocacy group Public Citizen.

During an appearance on Fox News, Kenneth G Langone, the conservative billionaire chair of New York University’s Langone Medical Center said he was “personally dealing directly with Michael Roman, the CEO of 3M.” He added: “My God, this company should get the Medal of Honor!”

Meanwhile, New York City’s public hospitals tried to order masks as early as January, said Dr Mitchell Katz, the CEO of New York City Health + Hospitals. The municipal corporation oversees a perpetually cash-strapped 11-hospital health system, the largest in the US. But the orders were never filled.

“We weren’t worried about money, we were worried only about protecting our healthcare workers,” said Katz, in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association. “All of those supply lines collapsed,” he said.

“The city system is under resourced,” said Leon Bell, a senior policy analyst for the New York State Nurses Association. “[Public hospitals] did not have the capacity, for example, which some of the private networks did, to call one of their billionaire board members, and say, ‘Hey, you know this guy who owns this factory in China who makes N95 masks? Can you tell him to ship us a plane load?’

Later New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, publicly thanked the co-founder of Chinese retail giant Alibaba for donating masks, gowns, goggles and ventilators.

In Massachusetts, Governor Charlie Baker turned to the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft, for help obtaining masks for healthcare workers. In that instance, state officials used the New England Patriots’ private plane to fly 1m N95 masks from China, after the federal government began intercepting personal protective equipment.

“You could almost use the image of an orchestra. The federal government was the conductor and it kept all of the disparate instruments playing in harmony,” said Dr William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “That, at the very least, was a role we would have anticipated where the federal government was more active.”

The same uneven approach has created new shortages. Medical equipment distributors said isolation gowns have emerged as the most recent vital piece of equipment in short supply. A survey by medical supply company Premier found that 74% of healthcare respondents now identify a lack of gowns as their top worry.

“Ramping up the production of face masks and respirators appears to have affected the material supply needed for isolation gowns, easing one shortage only to exacerbate another,” said Michael J Alkire, the president of Premier, which distributes personal protective equipment to more than 4,000 US hospitals and health systems.

Already, an untold number of healthcare workers have contracted and died from Covid-19. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at least 27 health workers have been killed by the virus, but, as the Guardian has reported, that does not represent the true toll.

Meanwhile, in Nevada, Love said obtaining personal protective equipment in this environment resembles a chaotic auction, with hospitals and states bidding against each other.

“You might have the money to outbid someone else, and then it means people in their community are going to die because you outbid?” said Love. “I committed my life to try to save lives, not to outlast the competition.”