Estimates of the increase in demand for personal protection equipment run up to 20 times the normal level
“THE BUILDING next door,” says Flavio Volpe, “is a seniors’ home.” Over Easter, as he drove to and from his office, children were outside, holding up signs sending love to grandparents within. The coronavirus had ruled out visits and hugs. On Easter Monday, April 13th, the director of the home, in the west end of Toronto, reported that 25 of its 247 residents had died of covid-19. “If you’re not asking what more you can do,” Mr Volpe says, “we’re all going to fall short.
Matching such standards seems to be proving impossible as supplies run short. Estimates of the increase in demand run up to 20 times the normal level. In Britain, health officials said on April 17th that some PPE may now be reused rather than discarded. Some medical staff have used bin liners for improvised protection; care homes are complaining of chronic shortages.
International goodwill has been in short supply too. Amid several reports of jiggery-pokery, French officials claimed that American buyers redirected masks from China destined for the Grand Est region, after stopping the shipment on the tarmac at Shanghai airport and offering three times the original price.
Fashion firms are turning their supply chains to masks and gowns. Sweden’s H&M has sent 50,000 masks each to Italy and Spain, and is planning to deliver 1m protective, single-use aprons to Swedish hospitals in the coming weeks, all from suppliers in China. Canada Goose, which makes outdoor apparel, has committed itself to making 60,000 disposable gowns, designed for isolation patients, per week from its domestic factories.
Medical equipment can indeed be hard to manufacture in hurry, particularly by firms that have never made it before. In Britain, NHS staff report that some new shipments of droplet-resistant gowns—of which there is a severe shortage, because they weren’t included in the existing pandemic stockpile, designed for airborne flu viruses—have failed quality tests when they arrived, rendering them unusable.
And clearing one bottleneck may reveal another. Although ventilators, for example, are crucial for treating many covid-19 patients in intensive care, they are not used in isolation. Every ventilator bed requires high-pressure oxygen as well as other machines to monitor the heart and kidneys. All this takes up more precious space and requires trained staff, of whom many are sick or in precautionary isolation.
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