For our look at health policy:
- Click here for the link.
In the spring, as public health officials were beginning to see the novel coronavirus spreading in Texas, Danny Updike had bad news and good news for health care workers in the San Angelo region where he works in emergency response.
The bad news was that the pandemic had brought a sudden shortage of masks, gowns, gloves and sanitizer as demand soared and imports from China ground to a halt. Prices on the private market were skyrocketing, and most of what remained in the shipping container that housed the region’s modest cache of personal protective equipment had expired after years of budget cuts prevented new purchases. Rubber parts were disintegrated, elastic bands rotted.
The good news: Some of the decade-old personal protective equipment was salvageable, and it had not yet been thrown away — another result of budget cuts.
“There really wasn’t a lot of money to pay to dispose of all that, so they had never done it, which turned out to be good,” said Updike, a former coordinator for the Hospital Preparedness Program in the region. “Most of the PPE in the Concho Valley, the first two months or month or so, they used mainly out of that.”
