Local hospitals face increasingly dire shortages of supplies used to administer antibiotics and hydrate the sick after Hurricane Maria stymied the supplier’s production in Puerto Rico.

“I would describe the status as deteriorating,” said Dr. O’Neil Britton, chief medical officer and senior vice president at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We’re managing the situation, but the outlook remains very concerning.”

MGH began seeing a decrease in its supply of “mini bags” in October — small IV bags used to dilute drugs like antibiotics so they can be administered slowly.

Baxter International Inc. is the primary resource for the supplies, which are produced at its Puerto Rico location. The shortage, which has been seen in hospitals nationwide, also has MGH running low on larger bags that hydrate patients with saline solution.

And the situation is only getting worse, Britton said. Various sizes of mini bags have run out, and those remaining are in “critically low” supply.

To try to conserve supplies, nurses are diluting the antibiotics manually, known as an “IV push” but that is a time-consuming process.

Doctors are also taking a closer look at who needs fluid antibiotics rather than the oral variety.

“We’re converting people to pills as fast as possible,” Britton said. “We’ve introduced checklists to our areas where clinicians are working hard and asking whether the patient needs IV fluids.”

State health officials are encouraging facilities to develop mitigation strategies.

“The intravenous (IV) fluid products manufacturing industry has a significant presence in Puerto Rico; this industry is experiencing disruption as a result of the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria,” Kerin Melisky, director of the state’s Bureau of Health Care Safety and Quality, wrote in a memo Thursday. “IV fluids or specifically small-volume parenteral solutions, which are solutions with a volume of 100 milliliters or less that are intended for intermittent intravenous administration, are at a critical shortage.”

Boston hospitals have been reporting this issue for several months, with no clear way of knowing exactly how long it’ll last. In October, Tufts Medical Center Executive Director of Pharmacy Ross Thompson told the Herald, “I don’t know that you’ll be able to talk to a hospital that hasn’t been affected.”

He added, “We don’t have any clarity around how long we’ll be in this state.”