US again runs low on medical gear
Brazil president tests positive for the virus after dismissing risk
The personal protective equipment that was in dangerously short supply during the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis in the U.S. is running low again as the virus resumes its rapid spread and the number of hospitalized patients climbs.
Meanwhile, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who has railed against social distancing measures and repeatedly downplayed the threat of the coronavirus as the epidemic in his country became the second-worst in the world, said Tuesday that he, too, has been infected.
Critics at home and abroad have called Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic cavalier and reckless, allowing the virus to surge across Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation.
He has shunned masks and at one point dismissed it as “a measly cold,” and when asked in late April about the rising death toll, he replied: “So what? Sorry, but what do you want me to do?”
Bolsonaro fell ill two days after he and a handful of his ministers attended a Fourth of July luncheon at the residence of Todd Chapman, the U.S. ambassador in Brazil. Bolsonaro and other attendees sat shoulder-toshoulder, embracing with no masks.
Speaking to journalists outside the presidential palace in Brasília shortly after noon Tuesday, Bolsonaro said he had taken a test Monday after experiencing fatigue, muscle pain and a fever.
He said he was feeling “very well,” which he credited to having taken hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug he has endorsed but which studies show does not ward off the virus. COVID-19 cases that become serious often take a turn for the worse about a week after symptoms emerge.
Bolsonaro did not express contrition for his handling of the pandemic and doubled down on his assertion that the virus poses little risk to healthy people. He characterized the diagnosis as a predictable outcome of a leadership style that requires him to be among the people.
“I am the president; I have to be on the front lines of the fight,” he said, comparing the virus to “rain, which is going to get to you.”
In the U.S., a national nursing union is concerned that personal protective gear has to be reused. A doctors association warns that physicians’ offices are closed because they cannot get masks and other supplies. And Democratic members of Congress are pushing the Trump administration to devise a national strategy to acquire and distribute gear in anticipation of the crisis worsening into the fall.
“We’re five months into this and there are still shortages of gowns, hair covers, shoe covers, masks, N95 masks,” said Deborah Burger, president of National Nurses United, who cited results from a survey of the union’s members. “They’re being doled out, and we’re still being told to reuse them.”
When the crisis first exploded in March and April in hot spots such as New York City, the situation was so desperate that nurses turned plastic garbage bags into protective gowns. The lack of equipment forced states and hospitals to compete against each other, the federal government and other countries in desperate, expensive bidding wars.
In general, supplies of protective gear are more robust now, and many states and major hospital chains say they are in better shape. But medical professionals and some lawmakers have cast doubt on those improvements as shortages begin to reappear.
During a call Tuesday between Trump administration officials and the nation’s governors, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said it’s important for gear to be reused and repurposed as a way to stretch the stocks and avoid shortages.
Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, who is in charge of coronavirus-related supplies for the White House, told Congress last week that more than than one-fourth of the states have less than a 30-day supply.
Although all states and territories have received some protective gear from FEMA, an Associated Press analysis of the agency’s own data f ound t hat t he amounts varied widely when measured by population and the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Many states say the federal supplies make up a small part of their stockpiles after they spent millions of dollars to acquire equipment on their own.
Presidential hopeful Joe Biden on Tuesday promised to shift production of medical equipment and other key pandemic- fighting products “back to U.S. soil,” creating jobs and bolstering a domestic supply chain he says has been exposed as inadequateby the outbreak.
The presumptive Democratic nominee’s campaign released a plan to reinforce stockpiles of a “range of critical products on which the U.S. is dangerously dependent on foreign suppliers“in places like China and Russia. That includes medical equipment and pharmaceuticals, but also energy and grid resilience technologies, semiconductors and key electronics, as well as telecommunications infrastructure and raw materials.
The New York Times contributed.