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The N95 shortage America can’t seem to fix
Nurses and doctors depend on respirator masks to protect them from Covid-19. So why are we still running low on an item that once cost around $1?
BALTIMORE — The patient exhaled. She lifted her tongue for a thermometer. She raised her finger for a blood sugar test, and that’s when she started coughing. One cough can send 3,000 droplets into the air, one droplet can contain millions of coronavirus particles, and now some of those particles were heading for the face of emergency department nurse Kelly Williams.
The nurse inhaled. Strapped over her mouth and nose was an N95 respirator, the disposable filtering mask that has become the world’s most reliable and coveted defense against the virus.
N95s were designed to be thrown away after every patient. By this July afternoon, Williams had been wearing the same one for more than two months.
To get to her, the N95 had traveled from a British factory to a Baltimore warehouse, in a supply chain as tangled and layered as the web of microscopic fibers inside the mask’s filter.
It was purchased by Johns Hopkins Hospital, the famed medical institution that has tracked cases of the novel coronavirus around the world since the pandemic’s start. When its map of dots marking clusters of infections began to show pools of red across the United States, Hopkins was quietly unpacking a stock of personal protective equipment it had been building for over a year — a literal lifesaver when the onslaught of Covid-19 cases led to a massive shortage of N95s.
Six months later, that shortage persists, leaving health-care workers exposed, patients at risk and public health experts flummoxed over a seemingly simple question: Why is the world’s richest country still struggling to meet the demand for an item that once cost around $1 a piece?
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Good question. We could build an atomic bomb but we can't make these masks? Trump needs to activate the Defense Production Act to get 3M or some other big company to start cranking these out.
