Getting equipment ‘enormously frustrating’
Baker vents over missing orders
A fired-up Gov. Charlie Baker sounded off Thursday on the struggle to get personal protective equipment to the people battling the coronavirus on the front lines.
“There are a lot of very compassionate and very brave people here in the commonwealth who are doing what they can to serve people, recognizing and understanding that in this particular area the entire country is struggling to deliver,” Baker said during his daily COVID-19 update at the State House. “I stand here as someone who has had confirmed orders for millions of pieces of gear evaporate in front of us and I can’t tell you how frustrating it is.”
“Our first responders, our health care workers, everybody deserves to have that gear and I’m telling you we’re killing ourselves trying to make it happen,” Baker said.
Since Baker established the Coronavirus Command Center just under two weeks ago, officials have placed more than $50 million in orders for PPE, according to Secretary of Health and Human Services Marylou Sudders.
To date, approximately 17% of the state’s request for supplies from the Strategic National Stockpile has been filled. Baker said he and many other governors struggle with “landing the order” when it comes to the equipment.
“We now have other orders that are outstanding that are probably quote unquote confirmed but we’ve literally got to the point where our basic position is until the, God, until the thing shows up here in the Commonwealth of Mass., it doesn’t exist,” Baker said. “But I’m telling you, people are spending hours and hours and hours trying to get this stuff here for exactly that reason.”
Over the past two weeks, the state has sent out more than 150 shipments of supplies from MEMA and the Department of Public Health, according to Sudders, who heads the Command Center. Officials sent more than 10,000 test swabs to 55 sampling sites and have distributed more than 28,000 masks and 120,000 pairs of gloves since Sunday.
“But we know we need to continue to move the supply chain,” Sudders said.
A number of “very significant manufacturers,” have decided to repurpose their processes to manufacture PPE gear, according to Baker.
“We are doing everything we can, through an incredibly messy thicket that is enormously frustrating for all of us, to try to get them the gear that they deserve and they need,” Baker said.