Medical workers resort to parking-lot deals and DIY projects to get safety gear
A nursing home worker in New Jersey cut a deal for gowns in a parking lot. A clinic director in Florida awaited midnight deliveries of tens of thousands of masks. A South Carolina cardiologist tried to buy ingredients from Lithuania to mix his own hand sanitizer.
Medical shortages in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, have left many healthcare workers in a desperate hunt for medical supplies. Community clinics, nursing homes and independent doctors, in particular, find themselves on the fringe of the supply chain for masks, gowns, gloves and ventilators. Desperate administrators wire money to offshore banks to acquire supplies.
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Most medical supplies – from isolation gowns to the filtration components of N95 masks – originate in China in factories that manufacture so-called spunbond polypropylene out of toxic chemicals. Decades of honing has turned the supply chain into an efficient wonder of globalization. But that crumbled in the face of the pandemic.
“You had all these brokers entering the market looking for arbitrage,” said Michael Alkire, president of Premier, a company that negotiates supply contracts for hospitals. “Unless you were a significant player, it was hard to get access.”
That’s how Carol Silver Elliott, president of the Jewish Home Family, a nursing home in Rockleigh, New Jersey, ended up wiring a man she knows only as “the parking lot guy” a “significant” amount of money for protective equipment for her staff. “I swear I don’t know his name,” she said.
As the crisis dissipates at major hospitals in cities like New York, Seattle and Detroit, the collateral damage is becoming apparent elsewhere.
The burden of managing the disease long-term is shifting to nursing homes, safety-net clinics and outpatient medical practices. As these facilities brace for waves of new infections, they are hustling to stock up on masks, gowns, testing kits, even disinfectant wipes.
It’s not going well.
