Medical Supply Chains
the Shortages of Masks and PPE
The Wall St. Journal had an interesting article yesterday, which helped explain why we have had an insufficient supply of respiratory masks and other personal protective medical equipment during the Covid 19 pandemic. Our domestic inventory in hospitals was allowed to deteriorate because there was no economic advantage to hospitals to maintain a large inventory of unused masks and personal protective equipment. The Government was not buying or maintaining the national stockpile and in fact under the Trump Administration and Republican control of Congress was cutting back on it despite the pleas of CDC and HHS to maintain it to fight future pandemics. The spending for pandemic supplies and equipment was diverted to meet the potential challenges of foreign bio-terrorism. Therefore domestic manufacturers were only producing enough to meet existing demand from hospitals and the federal government. They had increased production to meet the last pandemic and were left holding the bag of excess inventory when it subsided. Overseas manufacture of masks and equipment was cut off when China and other Asian producers diverted all their own domestic production for their own extraordinary domestic demand to address the pandemic. Wuhan was a major manufacturing hub for masks and PPE before the lockdown due to the pandemic.
So we were woefully under-resourced to protect our hospital workers, nursing home staff and first responders fighting the pandemic.