US medical supply chains failed, deaths followed
From the very moment the pandemic reached America’s shores, the country was unprepared.
Nurse Sandra Oldfield’s patient didn’t have the usual symptoms of COVID-19 — yet. But then he tested positive for the virus, and it was clear that Oldfield — a veteran, 53-year- old caregiver — had been exposed.
She was sent home by Kaiser Permanente officials with instructions to keep careful notes on her condition. And she did.
“Temperature 97.1,” she wrote on March 26, her first log entry. Normal.
She and her colleagues said they had felt unsafe at work and had raised concerns with their managers. They needed N95 masks, powerful protection against contracting COVID-19. Kaiser Permanente had none for Sandra Oldfield. Instead, she was issued a less effective surgical mask, leaving her vulnerable to the deadly virus.
Many others were similarly vulnerable, and not just at this 169-bed hospital in Fresno. From the very moment the pandemic reached America’s shores, the country was unprepared. Hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities didn’t have the masks and equipment needed to protect their workers. Some got sick and spread the virus. Some died.
The Associated Press and “Frontline” launched a seven-month investigation — filing Freedom of Information Act requests, testing medical masks, interviewing dozens of experts from hard-hit hospitals to the White House — to understand what was behind these critical shortages.
Medical supply chains that span oceans and continents are the fragile lifelines between raw materials and manufacturers overseas, and health care workers on COVID-19 front lines in the U.S. As link after link broke, the system fell apart.
This catastrophic collapse was one of the country’s most consequential failures to control the virus. And it wasn’t unexpected: For decades, politicians and corporate officials ignored warnings about the risks associated with America’s overdependence on foreign manufacturing, and a lack of adequate preparation at home, the AP and “Frontline” found.
As the pandemic rolled into the U. S., Asian factories shut down, halting exports of medical supplies to the U.S. Meanwhile, government stockpiles were depleted from a flu outbreak a decade earlier, and there was no way to rapidly restock. The federal government dangerously advised people not to wear masks, looking to preserve the supply for health care workers. Counterfeits f looded the market.
Now, with more than 210,000 Americans dead and the president himself infected with the virus, the U. S. grieves the consequences. And nurses are still being told to reuse masks designed to be thrown away after each patient.
At home with her aged dog Freckles at her side, Sandra Oldfield recognized the symptoms as she recorded them in her log over 11 days:
“Chills”
“Weakness”
“Dizziness”
She lost her appetite. Her handwriting grew shaky. Someone called an ambulance. Others came for her pets.
Although it will take years for researchers to understand why the pandemic was disproportionately worse in the U.S., early studies that compare different countries’ responses are finding that shortages of masks, gloves, gowns, shields, testing kits and other medical supplies indeed cost lives.
The lack of early testing was a major stumble. First, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tests were faulty. Then there weren’t enough. The Food and Drug Administration raced to approve more tests, but without access to cheap, disposable swabs — made almost entirely in Italy and now in very short supply — they were useless. U. S. public health departments’ worst fears were quickly realized.
Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a forum of the largest public health departments, said the lack of available information about the actual burden of the virus “set our country’s response back by an order of magnitude we will never know.”
Meanwhile, studies in nursing homes — in China, Washing ton state and across the U.S. — found that COVID-19 cases were significantly higher in places with shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE. Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Andrew T. Chan and colleagues found health care workers who didn’t have adequate PPE had a 30% greater chance of infection than colleagues with enough supplies. Black, Hispanic and Asian staffers had the highest risk of catching COVID-19, they found.