Hospitals around the country say their supplies of crucial medical supplies including personal protective equipment (PPE) are lower than ever as demand for different items has soared to an all-time high.
Data detailing usage rates of PPE and other supplies analyzed by Premier, a company that consults for health care systems, revealed that usage of supplies for COVID-19 testing and treatment has reached the highest rate seen since the pandemic began last year.
The data, gathered between May 2020 through January 2021, was supplied by 50 health care systems across the nation that are representative of the company’s larger population of clients.
PPE shortages first emerged last March, with officials in several states warning that they did not have enough supplies to adequately protect health care workers from being infected themselves.
Among the items seeing the highest demand as a result of surging COVID-19 hospitalizations through January include sterile water, which is used in many injections including the Remdesivir treatment former President Trumpreceived as part of his COVID-19 treatment regimen at Walter Reed Medical Center last year.
Usage of sterile water is up 350 percent from rates seen last May, according to Premier’s data, and hospital inventories have dropped an average of 50 percent.
Pipette tips and micro pipettes, used during the COVID-19 laboratory testing process, are also seeing higher demand than last year. Usage of pipette tips spiked to a more than 100 percent increase over last May during the holiday season in November and December before falling slightly in January, though it still remains at a far higher rate than hospitals reported early last year.
Hospital systems are also reporting these supplies much harder to find as of January, with the average delivery time for pipette tip orders jumping from a few days to nearly a month.
Some shortages were the result of the medical equivalent of the wave of panic-buying that swept U.S. stores early last year as the first lockdown measures were announced by various states, Premier’s data found.
“What was correlated … was the request for supplies and the stock market volatility index,” a Premier spokesperson said. “In other words, buying was more linked to perceived, rather than real, need. And even the perception of need is enough to trigger panic-buying that leads to shortages.”
The challenges faced by hospitals trying to acquire necessary supplies for COVID-19 testing and treatment extends to the efforts of states around the country to administer COVID-19 vaccines as well.
Premier representatives told The Hill that hospital systems are finding it difficult to acquire special syringes called “low-dead-space needles” required to extract the sixth dose from vials of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, a process not possible with normal syringes and further complicated by confusion over whether all the syringes provided by the federal government in vaccine ancillary kits fit the low-dead-space description.
In an emailed statement, an HHS spokesperson told The Hill that 80 percent of the syringes contained in new ancillary kits the federal government began issuing on Jan. 20 were low-dead-space needles, while the remaining 20 percent could not be used to extract the last dose from Pfizer vaccine vials.
“What has become a more pressing issue for our members, even more so than improving access to the low-dead-space syringes, is the need for vaccine,” a Premier spokesperson added to The Hill. “Despite increases in overall distributions to jurisdictions around the country, our members are often reporting steady or declining allocations of vaccine that is making it very difficult for them to continue or expand vaccination efforts in the communities that they serve.”
When asked what federal officials could do to respond to supply chain shortages, the company’s representatives pointed approvingly to a recent update of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines that advise Americans to avoid purchasing N95 masks as an example. Urging Americans to buy such masks could create a surge of demand, complicating existing shortages.
“While N95 supply is improving, the demand for highly protective masks has surged twelvefold during the pandemic, and Premier data shows that N95 usage increased 500 percent between July 2020 and January 2021,” a company spokesperson noted to The Hill.
The company is also urging President Biden to form a public-private advisory council consisting of manufacturers, physicians, pharmacists and others to identify supplies critical to COVID-19 testing, treatment and vaccine administration to ensure the availability of such supplies going forward. The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.
The Trump administration faced criticism throughout 2020 from Democratic lawmakers for not taking greater action via the Defense Production Act (DPA) to address shortages in medical supplies related to the pandemic. The Biden administration announced in January that it would use the DPA in a more aggressive fashion, and at the time identified roughly a dozen items including N95 masks that were in short supply.
“The team will work with the states and the manufacturers to ensure that we’re using the DPA as aggressively as needed to accelerate the supply of the vaccine,” said Bechara Choucair, Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine coordinator, in a statement last month.
Vaccines & Variants: The makers of COVID-19 vaccines are working out how to tweak their recipes just in case the shots need an update against worrisome virus mutations.
But changing the mix is just one step. Harder is deciding if the coronavirus has mutated enough to update vaccines — and if so, how. Flu vaccines are reformulated just about every year, and authorities are looking to that system as a blueprint.
“It’s not really something you can sort of flip a switch, do overnight,” cautioned an expert who directs a World Health Organization flu center from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Viruses always mutate, and one key step will be better tracking to target only the variants that really threaten the vaccines’ effectiveness, Lauran Neergaard reports.
Grocery Workers: As panicked Americans cleared supermarkets of toilet paper and food last spring, grocery employees gained recognition as among the most indispensable of the pandemic’s front-line workers. A year later, most of those workers are waiting for vaccines, with little clarity about when their turns may come. The chaotic U.S. vaccine rollout has resulted in a patchwork of policies that differ from state-to-state and even county-to-county. The result has been an inconsistent approach to vaccinating low-paid essential workers who are exposed to hundreds of customers each day. Alexandra Olson, Dee-Ann Durbin and Anne D’ Innocenzio report.
Muted Mardi Gras: Fat Tuesday has arrived in New Orleans. But officials in the tourism-dependent city aren’t hoping for big crowds. All Mardi Gras parades are canceled and bars have been closed since Friday. Even take-out drinks are forbidden. And officials put restrictions on crowds in the historic French Quarter, which is usually the scene of huge gatherings, Kevin McGill reports.
India’s dramatic fall in virus cases leaves experts stumped; South African health care workers eager for first J&J vaccines; WHO authorizes AstraZeneca’s shot
When the pandemic gripped India, there were fears it would sink the fragile health system of the world’s second-most populous country.
Infections and deaths were soaring in a country where social distancing was not easily practiced and unsustainable lockdowns impoverished millions.
The reasons for the decline are unclear. Experts have suggested some areas of the country may have reached herd immunity or Indians may have some pre-existing immunity. Krutika Pathi and Aniruddha Ghosal have this story from New Delhi
The government has also credited mask-wearing for reducing the spread of the virus. Determining what’s behind the drop in infections could help authorities control the virus in the country, which has reported nearly 11 million cases and over 155,000 deaths. While the caseload is the second worst in the world after the U.S., the reported death toll is less than that suffered by America, Brazil or Mexico.
South Africa Vaccines: Health care workers at the Ndlovu Care Group in a rural part of the country, from where Andrew Meldrum reports, are among those eagerly awaiting the first jabs of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is being rolled out to them starting this week. South Africa’s inoculation campaign has been disrupted by a last-minute change. Officials have decided to use the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, even though it is not approved for general use anywhere in the world, after a small study raised questions about how effective the AstraZeneca vaccine is against the variant found in South Africa.
“So many people, I test them and within days they have passed away,” says one South African nurse. “I want protection.” Many people are eager to be vaccinated in the nation, which has seen nearly 1.5 million confirmed cases and more than 47,000 deaths.
WHO AstraZeneca:The World Health Organization has granted an emergency authorization to the vaccine made by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. The move should allow the U.N. health agency’s partners to ship millions of doses to countries as part of a U.N.-backed program to tame the pandemic. It is the second vaccine green-lighted by WHO after the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved in December. The AstraZeneca vaccine has been licensed in over 50 nations but some African health experts worry it may be less effective against a virus variant first seen in South Africa, Maria Cheng reports.
France’s Youth in Despair:The long lines of young people waiting for food aid that stretch through Paris neighborhoods several times a week are a dramatic symbol of the toll the pandemic has taken on France’s youth. The economic fallout has weighed particularly heavily on young people in France — and their woes have been compounded by disruptions to their studies and social interactions. Nearly a quarter of young people in the nation can’t find work, and many university students now rely on food aid. A hotline devoted to students has seen a surge in calls, and young people have streamed into psychiatric wards. As President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged, “it’s hard to be 20” in coronavirus times. Sylvie Corbet reports.
More from Around the World:
Britain’s newly established quarantine hotels have received their first guests as the government tries to prevent new variants derailing its fast-moving vaccination drive. Under the new rules, people arriving in England from 33 high-risk countries must stay in designated hotel rooms for 10 days at their own expense.
The World Health Organization says coronavirus case numbers are stabilizing in parts of the Middle East. But the organization says the situation remains critical with more than a dozen countries reporting cases of new variants.
New Zealand has reported no new virus cases in the community for a second straight day. That raises hopes that a three-day lockdown in Auckland, the nation’s first in six months, will be lifted Wednesday.
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