State reaches deal to buy 200 million masks each month
SACRAMENTO — California has secured a deal to import about 200 million masks a month, following weeks of shortages in personal protective equipment for medical workers treating coronavirus patients.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said the supply would more than cover California’s expected need, potentially allowing the state to send masks to other places with shortages.
“As a nationstate with the capacity to write a check for hundreds of millions — no, billions — of dollars, we’re in a position to do something bold and big that could be a catalyst to increase supply,” Newsom said at a news briefing Wednesday.
The deal, which Newsom first announced Tuesday night on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” includes 150 million N95 respirator masks and 50 million surgical masks per month.
By comparison, the state has distributed more than 41 million N95 masks during the coronavirus pandemic, including from an expired emergency stockpile of 21 million respirators. Health care workers have complained that they are being forced to ration and reuse protective equipment.
“We’ve been competing against other states, against other nations, against our own federal government,” Newsom told Maddow. “We’re not waiting around any longer, and we’re no longer interested in the progress that we were seeing in the past.”
Mark Ghilarducci, director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said Wednesday that experience responding to wildfires and other disasters had prepared the state to build a “more sustainable pipeline of resources.”
The masks will come from a mix of nonprofit organizations, including Direct Relief, Americares and the California Endowment; contracts with large vendors including Bear Mountain Development Co. and McKesson; and a partnership with BYD North America, the Los Angelesbased arm of a Chinese automaker that has built electric buses for the state.
California is also set to begin using a technology, developed by the defense manufacturer Battelle, that will enable hospitals to sterilize and reuse N95 masks more than 20 times. Ghilarducci said that within the next week, a staterun center will have the ability to clean as many as 80,000 masks a day.
He said California collaborated with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on setting up the supply of masks and was not concerned about the agency commandeering its equipment, as other states have recently accused FEMA of doing.
“It is a oneteam, onefight effort, and we all are on the same page as we continue to move forward,” Ghilarducci said.
California will pay $990 million for the supply of masks, according to a letter sent by state finance officials to legislative budget leaders. It has paid the first half of that with $188 million from an emergency aid package approved by legislators before they adjourned for an extended recess last month and $307 million from a state disaster response fund.
Newsom did not say how long the contract was for, but suggested that California would receive the masks for several months.
On Tuesday, Newsom said stayathome measures were not only bending but also “stretching” the curve of infections, meaning that state public health officials anticipate the spread of the virus will not peak until the end of May. His administration has been preparing to set up 50,000 additional hospital beds, bring in tens of thousands of retired medical workers and students to treat patients, and acquire 10,000 more ventilators by the end of April.
The state also lent 500 ventilators this week to other states hit hard by the pandemic. Newsom said California could get the ventilators back if the need in its hospitals became pressing.