One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, many millions of N95 masks are pouring out of American factories and heading into storage. Yet doctors and nurses like Turner say there still aren’t nearly enough in the “ICU rooms with high-flow oxygen and COVID germs all over.”
A year into the pandemic, the disposable, virus-filtering N95 mask remains a coveted piece of protective gear. Continuing shortages have forced doctors and nurses to reuse their N95s, and ordinary Americans have scoured the internet — mostly in vain — to get them.
But Luis Arguello Jr. has plenty of N95s for sale — 30 million of them, in fact, which his family-run business, DemeTech, manufactured in its factories in Miami. He simply can’t seem to find buyers.
The Pentagon has authorized more than 1,000 active-duty service members to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with its vaccination effort against COVID-19.
The 1,110 active-duty troops will be broken up into teams of 222 people to support five state vaccination sites, according to a Defense Department fact sheet released Friday.
White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients called the effort a “critical part of our all of government response.”
An initial group of 222 will be deployed to a site in California in the coming days, top Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told reporters later on Friday.
“We expect that they’ll be able to get on site on or about the 15th of this month,” Kirby said, referring questions to FEMA as to the exact location.
.... Doctors, paramedics and nurses’ aides have been hailed in the United States as frontline Covid-19 warriors, but gone are the days when people applauded workers outside hospitals and on city streets. A year into the pandemic, with emergency rooms packed again, vaccines in short supply and more contagious variants of the virus threatening to unleash a fresh wave of infections, medical workers are feeling burned out and unappreciated.
Some health care experts are calling for a national effort to track the psychological well-being of medical professionals, much like the federal health program that monitors workers who responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
A little more than a third of nursing home workers have been getting COVID-19 vaccines when the shots are first offered, U.S. health officials said Monday.
