PPE Shortage Briefing

By Rebecca Finkel The Big Picture: COVID Rates Rising in the South As of this posting, the CDC is reporting a total number of 6,181,474 COVID-19 cases in the country, which is an increase of 290,942 in the past seven days. California, Florida and Texas still lead the country in total cases, but case rates (# of infections per capita) are highest in the Southeast part of the country, the highest being recorded in Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi. Louisiana reported 5,425 new cases in the past seven days, which brings the state’s current rate to 3,270 cases per 100,000 residents. …

By Rebecca Finkel The Big Picture: Natural Disasters Complicate a Crisis This week saw an increase of nearly 300,000 cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., bringing the total to 5,799,046 total cases. The states that saw the highest increases were California, Texas and Florida. Complicating this challenging public health situation are concurrent natural disasters: the wildfires in California and Hurricane Laura, which landed on the Gulf coast on Thursday. Each of these situations caused people to evacuate, creating a need for PPE at shelters. Shelters, which can be crowded, are at particular risk for creating super spreader events. The decreased…

By Unnati Gupta, Blog writer at GetUsPPE  The Big Picture  An update on the numbers: the United States now has more than 4.9 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and 160,000 total deaths. Numbers have continued to rise over the past week as the country struggled over mask mandates, PPE shortages, school reopenings, and more.  Healthcare Workers at Risk  With constant reports of PPE shortages in healthcare facilities, the notion that masks and gowns make healthcare workers immune to the virus has become widespread. While previous studies showed that healthcare workers are 10-20% more likely to be infected with COVID-19 than the…

By Unnati Gupta, a blog writer at GetUsPPE.org. The Big Picture  An update on the numbers: the United States now has over 4.33 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and 149,000 total deaths. The troubling data has pushed 30 states to mandate masks. Recently, governors in Minnesota, Ohio, and Indiana enacted mask-mandates in hopes of allowing businesses and schools to reopen. While some states are just beginning to mandate masks, California, the first state to order a lockdown, is facing severe consequences from reopening. Recently, California passed New York in total confirmed cases, reaching 417,000 coronavirus cases. A variety of factors have…

By Amanda Peery-Wolf GetUsPPE Article in The Lancet On Friday, May 15th, GetUsPPE put out a press release announcing a Correspondence article in The Lancet authored by several of our team members. The article analyzes data from GetUsPPE’s Demand Data Hub, showing that the PPE shortage remains widespread. It looks at the breakdown of registered needs across, for example, income quadrants, regions of the country, and urban, suburban, and rural areas. This study establishes GetUsPPE as the leading source of PPE demand data in the US.  The Fairness Framework We have launched “Fairness Framework” for the equitable distribution of PPE.…

How will reopening states affect healthcare workers? Summer weather is arriving early in some parts of the country, but beach umbrellas are not a cheerful sight for California governor Gavin Newsom. Frustrated by crowded shorelines, he reminded his constituents that the state is weeks, not months away from loosening stay-at-home restrictions--if Californians can observe social distancing until then.  Other state governments are moving in the opposite direction, allowing shops, movie theaters, and even, in Georgia’s case, salons and bowling alleys to reopen their doors. The majority of Americans would rather extend stay-at-home orders, though, and healthcare providers agree with them.…