Gov. Kate Brown said Tuesday that securing enough personal protective gear is one of the five components necessary for putting an end to her stay-at-home order imposed more than three weeks ago to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

But the governor and state epidemiologist Dr. Dean Sidelinger said they still don’t know how many masks, gowns, face shields and gloves they’ll need to launch Oregon on its return to normal daily life -- not only for health care workers but for a wide array of other people like hair stylists to go back to work.

“We don’t have a sense for what that need is,” Brown said. “... We do know that we need more.”

Those last words -- the need for more personal protective equipment, known as PPE -- remain a common refrain across the state.

Many health care workers have said they believe they’ve been given inadequate PPE -- one surgical mask to last an entire shift, for example, when the masks are meant for single uses and aren’t designed to filter out tiny droplets floating in the air.

But several of the major hospital systems in the greater Portland area have told The Oregonian/OregonLive over the past week that they have adequate PPE supplies, although they’re working every day to buy more.

None of the hospital systems -- Kaiser Permanente, Legacy Health, Providence Health & Services and PeaceHealth in Southwest Washington -- would say exactly how much protective equipment they have in stock and how many days they estimate their supplies will last. (Oregon Health & Science University didn’t respond to questions from The Oregonian/OregonLive.)

Their reluctance to share hard numbers could be because that’s a tough question to answer with so much uncertainty about how many COVID-19 patients will flock to hospitals in coming weeks. The hospitals don’t want to be wrong about how much protective gear they may need.

Another reason cited by a person associated with one Oregon hospital system: fear the federal government might seize incoming shipments of PPE if the hospitals are specific about how much they have on hand. According to a story in The Los Angeles Times last week, the federal government has been quietly taking some shipments with no explanation. The news organization reported that PeaceHealth recently lost out on a shipment of testing supplies.

PeaceHealth spokesman Jeremy Rush told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an email this week that the federal government diverted to the East Coast “vital test kit materials” that would have allowed the hospital system to use in-house machines to quickly determine if patients are negative for COVID-19. That, in turn, would have allowed PeaceHealth to “conserve valuable PPE at a greater rate," Rush said.

“Our analyzers remain idle, while we continue to send specimens to outside laboratory testing sites,” Rush said.

Meanwhile, some health care workers continue to express worry that they’re not adequately protected on the job.

Within the past two weeks, one worker at the oncology pharmacy at Kaiser’s Interstate Central medical offices and one worker at Kaiser’s Beaverton medical offices on Western Avenue tested positive for COVID-19, said Esai Alday, who works for UFCW Local 555, a union representing more than 1,000 Kaiser Permanente employees.

That’s on top of seven staffers who tested positive at Kaiser’s Westside Medical Center in Hillsboro starting in March.

Alday said just this week, Kaiser began handing out masks to pharmacy employees, but they weren’t surgical grade. Alday described them as “almost like a piece of cloth.”

“What our members have told us is they are not getting what they need,” Alday said.

A Kaiser spokesman didn’t immediately comment.

Rachel Gumpert -- a spokeswoman for the Oregon Nurses Association, a union representing 15,000 members across the state -- said nurses also are still experiencing “major issues” getting PPE.

“Management is rationing it so even if it’s in the building, nurses across the state are still not being given adequate access, resulting in wearing old masks over and over and over beyond the point of effectiveness,” Gumpert said.

The state announced last week a big shipment of protective gear -- including 150,000 N95 masks and 67,000 face shields -- from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Andrew Phelps, the director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, said the delivery would make a "huge difference.”

In all, since the coronavirus crisis began, the state has acquired and shipped out to counties and tribes statewide almost 670,000 N95 masks and about 87,000 face shields.

But it’s unclear how big of a dent the shipments are making because Phelps and other officials, including the governor, haven’t been able to say how long the gear will last. Brown said she’s trying to find out.

“We are obviously collecting the burn rate -- the use rate -- at hospitals and clinics around the state right now,” she said.

Sidelinger, the state epidemiologist, hinted that the situation is improving. But he didn’t provide numbers.

“PPE is becoming more available but not nearly as available as Oregon or any other state wants,” he said.l

-- Aimee Green; agreen@oregonian.com; @o_aimee

Reporter Brad Schmidt contributed to this story.

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.