Paranoid *****es are stealing them from hospitals and hoarding them from your local Costco

I'm going to bet there is a government regulation or two that led to this problem in the first place.
Edit to add: why we are relying on China to produce them in the first place.

Because they are replacing PPE rapidly so as not to spread the virus if it's possibly on the exterior of the PPE.

Also people aren't using it the proper way which is leading to a lot of waste

Fairview said:

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Shouldn't a hospital be ready for pandemic and not rely on those items being available on the open market during an emergency? All experts have always said a pandemic was a matter of if not when so it's not like they'd go unused. They could also rotate the stock if there are issue with age.

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The two primary roles of hospital administrators are to decrease costs and increase revenue. Just like other industries, they will use historical use averages and add a small amount of safety when ordering inventory. The problem is that some hospitals are running through a month's worth of typical PPE in a week or less and supply chains are lagging.

Healthcare wasn't ready for this virus and we are still in early stages. No sense in crying over spilt milk.

I did see one hospital administrator say that they were going through as much PPE in a week as they normally would in 6 months.

Hard to stock up for that.

bay fan said:

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I believe the government has a stock of PPE and vents and hasn't yet distributed. Hopefully they will get them out soon, several governors have been pretty clear of their need.

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Puerto Rico probably has crates and crates of PPE in warehouses.

AnScAggie said:

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I'm going to bet there is a government regulation or two that led to this problem in the first place.
Edit to add: why we are relying on China to produce them in the first place.

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3M has plants in the US running and making PPE.

Media panic has caused people to hoard these when it is not necessary. The masks are to prevent spread from sick people not to keep a healthy person from getting the virus.

If you wear a mask all day, but touch a doorknob a sick person coughed on without a mask then you defeat the purpose.

Increased use throughout the hospital system leads to shortages. We've also had quite a bit go "missing". People gonna people. We are now locking masks and gowns at night.

Most disposable PPE is made from certain types of man-made blown fabric. For a variety of reasons, the production of this fabric is concentrated in China. It's not a terribly environmentally friendly process and China was willing to make it without regulating it to death.

The production of the PPE articles eventually concentrated close to the source of the fabric production (China) to save shipping costs and enable just in time production.

Sterilization, where required, is also a chemically-dependent process that most people don't want in their back yard. China was also more flexible on this and lots of sterilization started being done in China.

PPE is a Class I medical device regulated by the FDA. You can only produce these products in a plant that is FDA approved to make that specific product. The time to stand up a new PPE manufacturing facility is 18-24 months.

China's COVID outbreak led to the shutdown of most of their factories, which meant not only were companies not making PPE, China also was not making the necessary fabric to make them from. Even if you had a FDA-approved facility with capacity to make PPE, you can't get the raw materials on a large scale.

And all this is on top of pandemic-related factors like hoarding, increased use, and thin hospital inventories.