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Hospitals and doctors say they are missing from the swabs needed to monitor patients for coronavirus, as well as in the mask and other devices for health workers.
By Katie Thomas
As the country’s ability to control coronavirus grows, hospitals and clinics say an impediment is coming: a shortage of control pads and protective devices for health workers.
At UCSF Health, a San Francisco hospital formula at the center of one of the country’s coronavirus outbreaks, officials said they deserve to avoid checking patients in about five days because they would run out of Nasopharynian swabs, which are inserted into patients’ noses. to get samples to check. Other hospitals in other parts of the country were finishing their practice of a swabing moment to check for influenza to maintain their supply.
The main manufacturer of swabs, Copán, is an Italian company with a production plant in northern Italy, a region that has been greatly affected by the coronavirus outbreak. He says he has accelerated production to meet the usual demand for a modest product in a different way than many doctors have so far been uns feared.
“We weren’t thinking of” wow, what’s our swab source? “Because we’ve never faced anything that has exhausted our samples before,” said Dr. Josh Adler, clinical director of the U.C.S.F. Bless you. To make things more difficult, swabs deserve to include the right ingredients (stems can’t be made of wood, for example) or the virus may not be detected well. “You can’t go to your local store and get swabs,” he said.
On Wednesday, UCSF Health said it had received a two-day swab source.
Dr. Ulrike Sujansky, an individual personal trainee in San Mateo, California, one of the regions with the highest cases, said she was only able to control a few patients due to problems of origin.
“We can’t prove it. We can’t prove it,” he said. The swab kits he asked for from the two largest lab companies, LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics, were late or not the right type, he said. It also does not have a mask or protective supplies good enough, despite weeks of efforts to buy them and recent calls to local and local government and hospitals. “I don’t have the team to deal with this whole crisis.”
After a failed deployment of coronavirus tests in February, Trump’s management attempted to increase the amount of testing that could be done for Americans by reducing regulatory hurdes and approving advertising tests conducted through corporations, such as Roche and Hologic, whose machines can run thousands of samples. Day. Large corporations in laboratories such as LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics have increased their capacity, as have hospital labs across the country.
But scarcity as the source of swabs now threatens this broader effort. Premier, who buys medical materials on behalf of many U.S. hospitals, said its members were also experiencing problems.
“Our hospitals are eager to make their assistance component expand to checks, but they are suffering to do so in the absence of mandatory check supplies,” said Soumi Saha, Senior Director of Premier Defense. He claimed that the company had requested more data from the F.D.A. about how to deal with the swab shortage a few days ago, but didn’t get an answer.
On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration said in a statement: “We have heard the considerations of laboratories that have questions about the availability of safe supplies. We update questions posed to labs and verify developers, providing data on reagent choice resources, extraction kits, swabs and more. The company said it has also established a toll-free line, 1-888-INFO-FDA, to help labs ask questions about approvals or supplies.
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