CT takes delivery of 6.7M pieces of PPE

NEW BRITAIN — Business and personal relationships spanning the country and across the Pacific Ocean are responsible for bringing Connecticut 6.7 million masks, surgical gowns and thermometers, Gov. Ned Lamont announced on Tuesday.

Gathering around dozens of members of the Connecticut National Guard who are staffing a warehouse here in an industrial zone, Lamont said that both the Chinese embassy and a major Chinese bank helped secure the delivery of $10 million in material that Lamont celebrated in a morning news conference.

“Today we’ve got 60 days worth of PPE,” said Lamont, who was given a hardhat tour of the vast warehouse, then held a news conference against a 10-foot-high backdrop of cardboard boxes full of rubber gloves. The shipment includes 100,000 thermometers.

Lamont’s announcement came on a day when the state Department of Public Health reported 33 new fatalities in the coronavirus pandemic, bringing the state total to 3,041 dead. But a net 23 reduction in hospitalizations kept the state on track for the May 20 reopening. On Tuesday, 1,189 people were in hospitals, the lowest since April 5.

“This is our national stockpile,” Lamont joked before the news conference, in reference to problems the state had in collecting PPE from Washington, when back in March orders were coopted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency seemingly just hours before they were supposed to head to Connecticut.

He said the new shipment came in since the weekend, culminating extensive networking and even a donation of $2 million in PPE from the China Construction Bank. Thousands of pieces of equipment came courtesy of Shandong, the state’s sister province in China. “It’s a good day. It’s a good day for Connecticut and we did it all together working hands across the ocean, so to speak,” Lamont said.

“Connecticut realized pretty early on that we had to take the lead on this ourselves, and Attorney General William Tong and myself, we reached out to Ambassador (Huang) Ping, the consul general,” Lamont said. “We worked every relationship we could find in and around China, because we know that’s where almost all the masks and gowns, the PPE, are produced. I’ve got to admit I am so grateful to the people of China.”

The shipment finally provides some assuredness in the state’s ability to provide first responders and smaller essential businesses personal protective equipment. “Now we’ve got some inventory,” he said. “Now we can give people some confidence.”

Lamont said that friends including Ray Dalio, the Greenwich hedge fund billionaire, and Carl Kuehner of the Stamford-based Building & Land Technology, also took advantage of relationships to help procure the equipment.

David Lehman, commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development, told reporters that there were multiple suppliers who generated the order, and that businesses can inquire about eligibility through the website of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association.

Later, during his daily news briefing in the State Capitol, the governor described the PPE acquisition as a complicated negotiation.

“It really took a while and all the different relationships that are necessary there,” Lamont said, describing the China Construction Bank’s contribution as a goodwill offering.

“For us to get to the front of the line with everybody trying to source PPE coming out of China, where let’s say most of the PPE comes from, took a variety of relationships,” Lamont said.

Josh Geballe, Lamont’s chief operating officer, recalled that when the PPE market fell apart in March, it made it much more difficult to procure.

“We are fortunate that the governor has incredible relationships in the business community, with people who have extensive relationships in China that can be called on to broker some of these deals like the one that was announced today,” Geballe said.

Lamont also hosted Marna Borgstrom, president and CEO of Yale New Haven Health System, and Auro Nair, executive vice president of The Jackson Laboratory,

who said that they are preparing for thousands of daily coronavirus tests.

Illustrating how much the pandemic has subsided, Borgstrom noted that Greenwich Hospital, which has 200 beds, maxed out at 126 COVID-19 patients, and now the census with the virus is below 40. At Yale New Haven, there were 475 COVID patients at the peak and it is now down to 310.

Geballe said that contract tracing efforts are operational, now that hospitalizations are on the downward side of the curve; on April 22 1,972 people hospitalized.

About 300 employees of both local health departments and the DPH are receiving training this week, then as many as 500 more volunteers will be recruited from medical and graduate research programs to interview COVID-19 patients who would be willing to speak about people with whom they might have had contact and transmitted the virus, so they can be quarantined to keep the virus from peaking again.