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America Faces a Critical PPE Shortage, Again

Jordan Davidson
Jul. 09, 2020 09:13AM EST Health + Wellness
America Faces a Critical PPE Shortage, Again
Nurses wear PPE prior to caring for a COVID-19 patient in the ICU at Sharp Grossmont Hospital on May 5, 2020 in La Mesa, California. Mario Tama / Getty Images

One of the initial reasons social distancing guidelines were put in place was to allow the healthcare system to adapt to a surge in patients since there was a critical shortage of beds, ventilators and personal protective equipment. In fact, masks that were designed for single-use were reused for an entire week in some hospitals.

Now, five months into the pandemic, health care workers are raising the same concern. They are facing a shortage of masks, gowns, face shields and gloves, as The Washington Post reported.

"We're five months into this and there are still shortages of gowns, hair covers, shoe covers, masks, N95 masks," said Deborah Burger, president of National Nurses United, who cited results from a survey of the union's members, as The Associated Press reported. "They're being doled out, and we're still being told to reuse them."

In a survey of 23,000 registered nurses, National Nurses United found 85 percent were asked to reuse masks designed for single use, according to The Washington Post.

The new shortage is not just affecting urban hospitals like it did in March. The rising demand for protective gear is now plaguing a broad range of health care facilities across the country, from urgent cares to doctors' offices to nursing homes. Several major medical associations said this was a preventable problem that would have required swift and aggressive action from the federal government in the early days of the pandemic, according to The New York Times. If the government had aggressively procured and distributed critical supplies, this shortage could have been avoided.

"A lot people thought once the alarm was sounded back in March surely the federal government would fix this, but that hasn't happened," said Burger to The Washington Post

She, like many health-care workers, blamed the Trump administration for the lack of equipment. She pointed out that the administration has insisted the responsibility falls to state and local officials, with the federal government playing only a supporting role.

In a letter to Congress last week, the health department in DuPage County, Illinois, near Chicago, said all its hospitals are reusing protective gear "in ways that were not originally intended and are probably less safe than the optimal use of PPE," as The Associated Press reported.

Neurologists, cardiologists and cancer specialists around the country have been unable to reopen their offices in recent weeks, leaving many patients without care, according to a letter from American Medical Association to the the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress.

"We have kids living with grapefruit-sized abscesses for over three months who can't eat or drink and there's nothing we can do for them because we can't get P.P.E.," said Kay Kennel, the chief officer of Lubbock Kids Dental, to The New York Times. Her clinic serves low-income families in Texas and has a list of 50 children awaiting emergency surgery. "It's been just horrible, and given the growing number of infections here, I'm afraid things are going to get worse."

Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, who is in charge of coronavirus-related supplies for the White House, told Congress last week that more than one-fourth of the states have less than a 30-day supply.

"It would seem like in less than 30 days, we're going to have a real crisis," said Rep. Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat, as The Associated Press reported.

That prompted the American Medical Association to write a letter to the White House, asking it to invoke the Defense Protection Act to require American manufacturers to increase supplies of N95 masks and gowns, as The Washington Post reported.

Former Vice President Joe Biden said yesterday that he would use that law to boost domestic protection of medical gear if elected.

As the New York Times noted, the nation's supply of PPE is trapped in an unsustainable supply chain model. The U.S. remains dependent on overseas manufacturers and various middlemen who raised prices sevenfold amid soaring global demand. There are only a handful of U.S.-based companies still making PPEs and they say they are already at maximum capacity.

So far, more than 900 health care workers have died of COVID-19, according to a tally by National Nurses United. Burger said many of the deaths have been linked to inadequate protective gear.

"There are tools at President Trump's disposal and he has failed us," she said to The New York Times. "These deaths are entirely preventable."

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By Tara Lohan

Warming temperatures on land and in the water are already forcing many species to seek out more hospitable environments. Atlantic mackerel are swimming farther north; mountain-dwelling pikas are moving upslope; some migratory birds are altering the timing of their flights.

Numerous studies have tracked these shifting ranges, looked at the importance of wildlife corridors to protect these migrations, and identified climate refugia where some species may find a safer climatic haven.

"There's a huge amount of scientific literature about where species will have to move as the climate warms," says U.C. Berkeley biogeographer Matthew Kling. "But there hasn't been much work in terms of actually thinking about how they're going to get there — at least not when it comes to wind-dispersed plants."

Kling and David Ackerly, professor and dean of the College of Natural Resources at U.C. Berkeley, have taken a stab at filling this knowledge gap. Their recent study, published in Nature Climate Change, looks at the vulnerability of wind-dispersed species to climate change.

It's an important field of research, because while a fish can more easily swim toward colder waters, a tree may find its wind-blown seeds landing in places and conditions where they're not adapted to grow.

Kling is careful to point out that the researchers weren't asking how climate change was going to change wind; other research suggests there likely won't be big shifts in global wind patterns.

Instead the study involved exploring those wind patterns — including direction, speed and variability — across the globe. The wind data was then integrated with data on climate variation to build models trying to predict vulnerability patterns showing where wind may either help or hinder biodiversity from responding to climate change.

One of the study's findings was that wind-dispersed or wind-pollinated trees in the tropics and on the windward sides of mountain ranges are more likely to be vulnerable, since the wind isn't likely to move those dispersers in the right direction for a climate-friendly environment.

The researchers also looked specifically at lodgepole pines, a species that's both wind-dispersed and wind-pollinated.

They found that populations of lodgepole pines that already grow along the warmer and drier edges of the species' current range could very well be under threat due to rising temperatures and related climate alterations.

"As temperature increases, we need to think about how the genes that are evolved to tolerate drought and heat are going to get to the portions of the species' range that are going to be getting drier and hotter," says Kling. "So that's what we were able to take a stab at predicting and estimating with these wind models — which populations are mostly likely to receive those beneficial genes in the future."

That's important, he says, because wind-dispersed species like pines, willows and poplars are often keystone species whole ecosystems depend upon — especially in temperate and boreal forests.

And there are even more plants that rely on pollen dispersal by wind.

"That's going to be important for moving genes from the warmer parts of a species' range to the cooler parts of the species' range," he says. "This is not just about species' ranges shifting, but also genetic changes within species."

Kling says this line of research is just beginning, and much more needs to be done to test these models in the field. But there could be important conservation-related benefits to that work.

"All these species and genes need to migrate long distances and we can be thinking more about habitat connectivity and the vulnerability of these systems," he says.

The more we learn, the more we may be able to do to help species adapt.

"The idea is that there will be some landscapes where the wind is likely to help these systems naturally adapt to climate change without much intervention, and other places where land managers might really need to intervene," he says. "That could involve using assisted migration or assisted gene flow to actually get in there, moving seeds or planting trees to help them keep up with rapid climate change."


Tara Lohan is deputy editor of The Revelator and has worked for more than a decade as a digital editor and environmental journalist focused on the intersections of energy, water and climate. Her work has been published by The Nation, American Prospect, High Country News, Grist, Pacific Standard and others. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis. http://twitter.com/TaraLohan

Reposted with permission from The Revelator.

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The last Ice Age eliminated some giant mammals, like the woolly rhino. Conventional thinking initially attributed their extinction to hunting. While overhunting may have contributed, a new study pinpointed a different reason for the woolly rhinos' extinction: climate change.

The last of the woolly rhinos went extinct in Siberia nearly 14,000 years ago, just when the Earth's climate began changing from its frozen conditions to something warmer, wetter and less favorable to the large land mammal. DNA tests conducted by scientists on 14 well-preserved rhinos point to rapid warming as the culprit, CNN reported.

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The study, published in Current Biology, notes that the rhino population stayed fairly consistent for tens of thousands of years until 18,500 years ago. That means that people and rhinos lived together in Northern Siberia for roughly 13,000 years before rhinos went extinct, Science News reported.

The findings are an ominous harbinger for large species during the current climate crisis. As EcoWatch reported, nearly 1,000 species are expected to go extinct within the next 100 years due to their inability to adapt to a rapidly changing climate. Tigers, eagles and rhinos are especially vulnerable.

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To figure out the cause of the woolly rhinos' extinction, scientists examined DNA from different rhinos across Siberia. The tissue, bone and hair samples allowed them to deduce the population size and diversity for tens of thousands of years prior to extinction, CNN reported.

Researchers spent years exploring the Siberian permafrost to find enough samples. Then they had to look for pristine genetic material, Smithsonian Magazine reported.

It turns out the wooly rhinos actually thrived as they lived alongside humans.

"It was initially thought that humans appeared in northeastern Siberia fourteen or fifteen thousand years ago, around when the woolly rhinoceros went extinct. But recently, there have been several discoveries of much older human occupation sites, the most famous of which is around thirty thousand years old," senior author Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Center for Paleogenetics, said in a press release.

"This paper shows that woolly rhino coexisted with people for millennia without any significant impact on their population," Grant Zazula, a paleontologist for Canada's Yukon territory and Simon Fraser University who was not involved in the research, told Smithsonian Magazine. "Then all of a sudden the climate changed and they went extinct."

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For example, she says that locally owned businesses can lead the local clean energy economy and create new jobs in underserved communities.

"We really need to think about … connecting climate and energy with other issues that people wake up every day really worried about," she says, "whether it be jobs, housing, transportation, health and well-being."

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