In early April, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned that the state only had enough enthusiasts to last six days, despite waves of critical coronavirus patients arriving at hospitals.
He temporarily revealed a plan to remove major breathing apparatus from communities in the northern state with epidemics limited to hospitals in the New York domain most affected by the virus.
“I’m not going to let other people die because we don’t redistribute the fans,” Cuomo said at the time, and said the National Guard would deploy to take the fans.
It temporarily unleashed a firestorm over the chaotic reaction to severe shortages of medical supplies.
While New York has narrowly avoided running out of enthusiasts after receiving an 11-hour shipment of 1,000 devices from China, the episode revealed the consequences of the excessive use of the U.S. reliance on overseas production.
The shortage of non-public protective equipment, which is also manufactured in China, highlighted the challenge and contributed to the number of coronavirus deaths in New York and New Jersey of approximately 32,600 and 15,825, respectively, the highest nationwide.
Today, after all this death and suffering, the Northeast has the lowest rates of contagion in the country and is for a moment the outbreak of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus.
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However, record rates of COVID-19 infection in other parts of the country have renewed reports of shortages of medical materials, from non-public protective devices (PPE) and materials to disinfectant wipes and medicines.
Some fitness experts and experts said that not all government grades had sufficiently consolidated distribution chains and medical sources during the fall, complicating ongoing discussions on the reopening of schools.
“We haven’t done enough and I’m deeply involved in that we’re also going to have a COVID with the flu,” said Dr. Lewis Kaplan, president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine.
“I’m very involved in getting into this same Position Array … where we may not have enough PPE and we may not have enough fans,” he said.
Dr. Aliaksei Pustavoitau, an extensive care expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said the northeastern reaction of this spring’s pandemic peak revealed huge gaps in emergency preparedness in American medicine.
“The magnitude of what happened didn’t fit with the plans,” he said, adding that “the source chain was designed to move things just in time.”
“When those source chains collapse, they’ll all run out,” he said.
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In New York, the national and federal government recently announced a series of measures to bring domestic medical supplies to life.
For example, approximately $11 million in grants were awarded to 20 New York-based corporations to reorganize their operations and manufacture COVID-19 materials. The agreements aim to produce millions of N-95 protective masks, materials and a wide variety of other equipment.
In pronouncing the subsidies, Cuomo said that “the country has learned a tough lesson of not having a major material supply chain founded here in the United States and that, as a result, we have had the global looking for important products.
“It may not take place in New York,” he added, referring to the increase in production in the state.
But to perceive the intensity of the problem, that less than 10% of the masks used in the United States are manufactured here. China manufactures almost part of the world’s masks, gowns, gloves and other PPE.
In addition, New York State fitness officials issued prescriptions on July 21 that required hospitals to have at least 90 days of PPE materials through September 30, and a similar directive required retirement homes to have a 60-day supply.
Any facility that meets the needs may have your operating licenses suspended or revoked.
However, many hospital operators reported difficulties before this month to get equipment.
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“The available source is limited and costs remain very high,” said Bea Grause, president of the New York State Health Care Association, the Albany-based organization that represents hospitals and nursing homes.
Grause said health care operators are running for the new garage mandate. Ongoing efforts to fill state and federal PPE stocks can also be critical as national bodies accumulate, he added.
However, as federal efforts to improve PPE production are expected to fail, the state of many state reserves of medical materials remains secretly involved.
Jill Montag, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health, said the agency prohibits commenting on her actions.
Similarly, New Jersey state officials have declined to reveal many major points about their PPE strategy.
This includes the number of days of protective appliances that the state must have on hand or the extent to which it is close to achieving this goal.
State officials cited “internal security issues” as an explanation of the reason for the public disclosure of this information.
Reports of PPE shortages have sparked an offensive against nurses in the northeast and county.
Health unions have asked state governments and hospitals to disclose data on the acquisition of PPE and protection and education criteria for frontline workers.
Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, president of the New York State Nurses Association, said the existing scenario evokes memories of hospitals and fitness leaders who ignored nurses’ considerations of harmful situations early in the pandemic.
“They basically say we have an inventory of PPE and we’re ready, but that’s what they said six months ago,” he said, adding that the result was that a lot of nurses “didn’t feel in the paintings and that a lot of us were sick.” . “
Nationally, only 24% of nurses their employer provides a safe workplace, according to a survey conducted through National Nurses United in July, indicating that more than 165 nurses have died as a result of COVID-19.
In addition, the New Jersey Union of Health Professionals and Related Employees said that the lack of adequate protective equipment, insufficient education, and lax application of protection needs through the government have the disease of a lot of frontline fitness personnel with coronavirus infection.
Union members also said that a large shortage of PPE persists today, even as the state reopens and prepares for a imaginable resurgence of cases.
“We know that if we’re safe, neither are our patients,” said Debbie White, president of the union.
New York’s desperate rush to track down enthusiasts of many tactics led the federal government to pay nine corporations $2.9 billion for $187,000 breathing apparatus to increase national pandemic stocks.
But some fitness care experts have expressed fear that fan distribution problems, such as the deployment of doctors trained in device use across the country, remain unresolved.
“Overall, the enthusiast is good,” Pustavoitau said. “But the challenge we’ve noticed is how they’ve been distributed to the poorest areas.”
Meanwhile, some Democratic lawmakers have pushed for the law to federalize the management of the medical source chain, resulting in the reported shortage of the pandemic.
The White House defended its control over the distribution of PPE and enthusiasts and promoted efforts to produce medical products in the United States, such as the $765 million government loan to Eastman Kodak Co., based in Rochester, New York, to boost domestic generic production. Drugs
However, growing considerations about the accumulation of COVID-19 cases today mean that some fitness experts, unions and hospital occupational teams warn that local and state leaders may not have the equipment to engage the virus this fall.
For example, councheck out leader in New York’s COVID-19 testing infrastructure has recently passed 6 million diagnostic tests since March. But there are demanding situations left for touch-study systems that seek to identify others potentially exposed to the virus and convince them to quarantine them.
In addition, a survey conducted last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 54% of other people inflamed with a coronavirus could not have known who might have inflamed them.
Experts said the effects of the survey highlighted how asymptomatic, community-based spread complicates the search for the pandemic. In New Jersey, officials said this week that there was an additional impediment because others do not need to provide key data to touch the markers, hampering efforts to control the spread of the virus.
And all of this is combined as new tensions in medical materials and interstate highways are jeopardizing epidemic mitigation methods across the country.
“This really has to be a federal effort,” Kaplan said, adding that it would involve greater coordination of everything from drugs and fans to doctors and nurses.
“We have a national health care crisis,” he said. “And I’d like to hear you say that we don’t have a national health care system, but in that key and vital way, we’re going to create one for all of us.”
USA TODAY informants Lindy Washburn, Terrence McDonald and Alexis Shanes contributed to the report.
Follow journalist David Robinson on Twitter: @DrobinsonLoHud