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Coronavirus cases rise dramatically among hospital workers

WCVB reports the number of Covid-19 cases among Boston hospital workers rose 142% between March 30 and April 13. The story includes breakdowns for each hospital.

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Why dont hospitals have a stockpile of protective gear?
I would think it's the easiest thing to keep on hand, easier than drugs and ventilators.
Hindsight is 20/20 but relying on the government for basic work supplies isn't smart and puts their workers and patients in danger.

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My understanding is that they do, but the size of the stockpiles has been shrinking for years as efficiency concepts like LEAN management and just-in-time inventory have taken root in hospitals, brought by administrators with business backgrounds who arrive with a mandate to cut costs. Part of the motivation is to improve profits and operating margins, but it's also in part an unintended consequence of our society-wide effort to reduce health care costs. It's not all greed and poor planning.

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Hospitals did have a stockpile of PPE and medical equipment. This is a GLOBAL pandemic: do you think medical supplies and equipment magically last forever and/or multiply themselvse? In addition, Gov. Baker ordered 3 million masks that the 45 Adminstration confiscated at the port in NY, added it to the National stockpile that Kushner calls it their stockpile, not the states. Pay attention. Read. Research. Listen.

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...they relied on the supply chain.

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Because hospitals didnt have a stockpile which would see them through the pandemic.
I just thought plenty of extra paper masks and gowns should be in boxes somewhere in case of an emergency..

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Clearly it would have been a useful thing to have some, but probably like most people, you didn't feel like it was worth the money and space (if you even thought about it at all). This is an unprecedented event and acting like any organization or business should have been completely prepared for it seems pretty silly.

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But I dont run a Hospital and I dont think it's unusual to think a Hospital should be prepared for a pandemic.
Thanks for calling my assumption silly, seems like you cant make an observation or have an opinion on this site without recieving at least one snarky response.

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I would like to point out a lot of PPE technically has expiration dates. So it's not like you can just stock millions of N95s for instance in the hospital basement and that will keep for 20 years of pandemic prep. Outside of a pandemic, finding anything expired and out of compliance w/ policy and procedure is like "a big f'in deal" during normal operations of a hospital.

Also, healthcare is run as a business in this country. It's run and evaluated like a business in a lot of countries even w/ nationalized healthcare, UK's NHS, for instance. There is no profit/savings since pandemic response is never a moneymaker, whether it happens or not. If it happens. I don't agree w/ running healthcare purely as a business, but as someone who's been in the industry for 20 years, all I can say is, here we are!

Let's get back to who is in the best position to deal with this national situation: The federal government has virtually unlimited ability to issue debt via treasury bonds, compared to the ability of non-profit and for-profit healthcare to do so. The Feds are also the ultimate arbiter of healthcare regs. Thus, it makes sense that pandemic supply responsibility was delegated to them, as they are in the best position to order, acquire, and manage such a supply.

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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/11/america-two-decade-fai...

“In advance of a pandemic, anything you say sounds alarmist,” Leavitt explained. “After a pandemic starts, everything you’ve done is inadequate.”

I think you are right in the sense that the government was not prepared for this, and that they should have urged/helped hospitals and their supply lines to also be ready.

I think there was failure on many levels. I'm sure there were Hospital administrators who warned their bosses that they were unprepared for a pandemic, and I'm sure the same situation happened at the Federal and State levels of government as well.

We also aren't going to have complete answers to any of these questions either at this point.

(As for the expired mask by dot, I'm guessing those dates may be very arbitrary for many masks, but I could be wrong)

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But I’ve got a box of N95 masks that have been sitting around for about 10 - 12 years, and the rubber straps on all of them are degraded enough to have broken off. Somewhere in between “good to use” and “visibly damaged” was presumably a stage of “looks fine but can snap without warning” and the expiration dates would have been set so health care workers don’t take that risk. So masks really are not something you can store mass quantities of indefinitely, for once-in-a-century emergencies. Ditto with latex or nitrile or any elastomeric gloves.

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I would think the masks themselves would do fine though. Again, I’m not 100% sure on the science behind them, but lots of things have expiration dates that are arbitrary.

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...the "burn rate" on PPE due to Coronavirus is "probably" (multiple?) orders of magnitude larger than a mass casualty event. And this event is lasting (multiple?) orders of magnitude (weeks/months?) longer than a single mass casualty event.

So Excessive Burn Rate times Extended Mass Casualty Event is not something an individual hospital is likely to be prepared for.

Any advanced preparation may have helped for a short while but it eventually goes back to relying on the same supply chain everyone else does. Or find yourself a Patriots Plane.

Consider how individuals handle emergencies: How many Americans have emergency savings of $400? How many Americans can prepare for an issue that costs 10x as much per day and lasted 10x days ($40000)? Now consider it was a hospital level of needs/costs.

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never anticipated a supply chain failure, and storing those things cost money that could better be spent on bonuses.

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You left out the part where the state ordered 3 million units via BJs Wholesale ...

AND FEMA STOLE THEM FROM THE PORT OF NY!

FEMA has also SEIZED SUPPLIES from hospitals in central MA and other hospitals across the country: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-washington-s...

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It’s hard to believe how much PPE is needed now compared with 2 months ago. Prior to this, I might put on an N95 once a month if even. Now, it’s every day. Before, about 1/3 of patients were on « precautions », meaning that we needed PPE while in the room. Now it’s almost everyone. We are treating almost every patient as though they have the disease and at BWH at least, even if you have negative testing, for the most part the PPE stays in place due to the unreliability of the test.

This crisis was absolutely unprecedented. No-one was prepared.

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My guess is that when doing disaster planning, the idea of an infectious disease putting as much pressure on the health care system as has happened was not the first thing that came to mind.

Add to that the fact that this is a global pandemic, first breaking out in the nation that is the factory of the world and thereby most likely to requisition new production of PPE to handle their situation, meant that when all of this started to become a thing, the supplies weren't there.

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Cheeto Mooselini said "get your own" to states.

Then he stole the gear that MA purchased.

Any questions?

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What tragic news for our medical workers and their families. I am saddened, angry, and like a lot of us feel so helpless in the face of the outbreak. Thank you Adam for keeping us all informed during these tough and scary times.

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Among nursing home workers? They have the least amount of personal protective equipment available to hospital workers.

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I'm surprised the increase is so small.

Look at it in context: On March 30th, Massachusetts had 5752 cases of Covid-19 in the general population, according to Wikipedia. On April 13th, Massachusetts had 26,867 cases--an increase of more than 360%.

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