FEMA Sends Faulty Protective Gear to Nursing Homes Battling Virus

The controversy over inadequate protective equipment has come to embody what critics describe as a haphazard federal effort to protect the 1.5 million Americans who live in nursing homes.

By Andrew Jacobs of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"Expired surgical masks. Isolation gowns that resemble oversize trash bags. Extra-small gloves that are all but useless for the typical health worker’s hands.

Nursing home employees across the country have been dismayed by what they’ve found when they’ve opened boxes of protective medical gear sent by the federal government, part of a $134 million effort to provide facilities a 14-day supply of equipment considered critical for shielding their vulnerable residents from the coronavirus.

The shipments have included loose gloves of unknown provenance stuffed into unmarked Ziploc bags, surgical masks crafted from underwear fabric and plastic isolation gowns without openings for hands that require users to punch their fists through the closed sleeves. Adhesive tape must be used to secure them.

Health regulators in California have advised nursing homes not to use the gowns, saying they present an infection-control risk, especially when doffing contaminated gowns that must be torn off.

Some nursing homes have received masks with brittle elastic bands that snap when stretched. None of the shipments have included N95 respirators, the virus-filtering face masks that are the single most important bulwark against infection."

"“The federal response to protect one of the most vulnerable populations in the country has been a dismal failure,” said Tamara Konetzka, a health economist at the University of Chicago who has been studying the pandemic’s outsize impact on nursing home residents."