Nursing homes battling virus with faulty gear sent by FEMA
Expired surgical masks. Isolation gowns that resemble oversize trash bags. Extra-small gloves that are all but useless for the typical health worker’s hands.
Nursing home employees across the country have been dismayed by what they’ve found when they’ve opened boxes of protective medical gear sent by the federal government, part of a $134 million effort to provide facilities a 14-day supply of equipment considered critical for shielding their vulnerable residents from the coronavirus.
The shipments have included loose gloves of unknown provenance stuffed into unmarked Ziploc bags, surgical masks crafted from underwear fabric and plastic isolation gowns without openings for hands that require users to punch their fists through the closed sleeves. Adhesive tape must be used to secure them.
Some nursing homes have received masks with brittle elastic bands that snap when stretched. None of the shipments has included functional N95 respirators, the virus-filtering face masks that are the single most important bulwark against infection.
“People hate to complain about personal protective equipment they’re getting for free, but many of these items are just useless,” said Brendan Williams, president of the New Hampshire Health Care Association. “It’s mystifying that the government would think this is acceptable.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency began shipping the masks, gowns and gloves this spring to 15,000 nonprofit nursing care facilities with limited finances that have made it difficult to buy protective equipment on the open market. The first cache of shipments was completed in mid-June, and the second round will wrap up by early August.
In a statement, FEMA said it had addressed the complaints about the first shipment of goods and had asked the private contractor providing the supplies to replace the tarplike gowns with models more familiar to medical personnel.
“We have received complaints on less than 1 percent of the total PPE shipments to nursing homes,” the statement said. “We continue to engage with nursing homes to keep lines of communication and feedback open at all times.”
More than 40 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the United States have been tied to nursing homes, according to a New York Times analysis, which found that the virus had infected 316,000 people at 14,000 facilities as of July 15. The virus has been particularly lethal to those in their 60s and older, more so for those in poor health, and it can rapidly spread through buildings where residents live in close quarters and workers move from room to room.
“The federal response to protect one of the most vulnerable populations in the country has been a dismal failure,” said Tamara Konetzka, a health economist at the University of Chicago who has been studying the pandemic’s outsize effect on nursing home residents.
The crisis is likely to intensify. Infections at long-term care centers in hot-spot states have jumped by 18 percent since late June, according to an analysis by Kaiser Family Foundation. Florida recorded a 51 percent rise, and Texas saw its cases climb by 47 percent.
In a call with nursing home providers last month, Col. Brian Kuhn, director of operations at the Defense Logistics Agency, blamed Federal Resources Supply Co., the private contractor that is providing the goods.
“They just kind of carte blanche shipped them all out,” Kuhn said, according to a recording of the call posted online. He said that the masks made from underwear fabric were not intended to be used by staff members — only by nursing home visitors — and that the expired respirator masks should never been distributed. “It was one of those things, I’ll be honest, that just slipped through the cracks,” he said.
Federal Resources, based in Stevensville, Md., did not respond to questions sent by email.