Hospitals even far away from the coronavirus hot spots lack protective gear, because doctors, nurses, and workers are forced to presume that all patients are a risk to transmit the virus.
“Right now, we consider every patient to be a COVID-positive patient,” Dr. Shannon Sovndal, an emergency medicine doctor at Boulder Community Hospital in Colorado, told the Washington Examiner.
Physicians and nurses at Boulder Community Hospital wear personal protective equipment, such as N95 respirator masks, as a precaution when they see every patient, even if the patient goes to the emergency department without showing symptoms of the coronavirus.
“We’ve had numerous times where a patient has come in with another complaint, say they’ve tripped and they’ve fallen,” Sovndal said. “And when they’re in the ER, they’ve developed a fever, and that’s when we test them, and they’ve been COVID-positive the whole while we were treating their broken fibula.”
More than 367,500 people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus, and at least 10,900 people have died, according to a tracker maintained by Johns Hopkins University. New York is the viral epicenter for now, with more than 122,000 cases and 4,100 deaths. Now, governors in Michigan, Illinois, Louisiana, and other states are bracing for major outbreaks.
The outbreak has yet to hit its peak in much of the country, and hospitals are already running low on masks, gloves, and protective gowns to treat the influx of new patients.
“Across the country and in our ER, we are essentially wearing our protective equipment the whole shift,” Sovndal said. “So when I come into work, I put on my protective equipment, and I’ll be wearing that for the entire duration of my shift in the emergency department.”
Hospitals large and small have started reusing their surgical masks to make up for dwindling resources. About 58% of hospitals reuse N95 and surgical masks, and nearly half say the mask shortage is hurting their ability to provide care, according to data collected from March 23-26 by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.
“We have to reuse our N95 masks for a number of shifts. This isn’t ideal, because N95 masks are supposed to be single-use,” Dr. Rob Davidson, an emergency medicine doctor in West Michigan, told the Washington Examiner. “Now, at the end of my shift, I put the mask into a bag to use on my next shift.”
President Trump has touted his administration’s efforts to distribute more masks, gloves, and protective gear to coronavirus hotspots in recent weeks. For instance, he said Sunday that 300 million gloves, nearly 8 million masks, and 3 million gowns have landed in states seeing the most severe outbreaks. Still, Department of Homeland Security officials said last week that the Strategic National Stockpile that was created decades ago to respond to a national emergency is nearly empty despite White House claims that there are enough supplies to carry states through the pandemic.
Governors have been stuck in bidding wars for protective gear for weeks, as Trump has said that states are responsible for responding to the pandemic. States have received supplies from the stockpile, but thousands of masks and protective gear had dry rot and didn’t work when they went to states last month, according to Time.
The federal government is discouraging people from buying protective masks, saying that supplies must be reserved for medical professionals. Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted that “if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Some hospitals, including Boulder Community Hospital, have sterilization systems for PPE that will clean the PPE and have it ready for use the following day.
“We put our N95 masks in a brown paper bag, and the hospital picks that up at the end of the shift, and they clean it for us using UV cleaning system, and then they drop that back off so that we have that PPE again,” Sovndal said.
Not every healthcare center has a mask-cleaning system, but more may become available soon. The Food and Drug Administration issued a new waiver to Battelle, an Ohio-based nonprofit organization last week, allowing the company to deploy its two sterilization machines, each able to decontaminate about 80,000 masks per day, to states experiencing the worst outbreaks.
Before sterilization machines become commonplace and manufacturers transform parts of their factories into mask-making assembly lines, the shortfalls are likely to worsen. Sovndal expects the peak number of new cases and casualties to come to Colorado in about 10 days, at which point doctors will begin downloading patients to temporary hospitals in tents around the city and cots throughout area hospitals.
“Now we’re waiting for the assault, and in 10 days or 14 days, this is going to be a totally different picture,” Sovndal said. “It’s going to be stressful, and we’re going to be full in battle with this in our community.”
