Tennessee doctors advised to use diapers, swim goggles and bandanas to cover face if PPE is not available
As the coronavirus pandemic intensifies, an odd advisory has come from the Tennessee Department of Health. The department reportedly advised doctors to use swim goggles, bandanas, scarves and even diapers to protect their faces should they be unable to obtain PPE (personal protective equipment) due to shortages.
Dr Sonal Gupta, a primary care physician whose husband is an anesthesiologist, said she thinks her husband will likely become infected at some point, adding that he was already living in a separate room of their home to try to protect Gupta and their children.
Gupta, who is working from home, said her husband does not have that option, and that he has been told to wash and reuse his eye shield, which he usually replaces when he leaves and reenters the room.
Gupta is reportedly one of more than 2,000 Tennessee doctors and nurses who petitioned Governor Bill Lee to issue an immediate stay-at-home order to try to slow the spread of the new coronavirus. Tennessee has more than 900 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with three deaths so far, but the Associated Press reported that doctors have predicted the possibility of over 40,000 deaths in Tennessee in the absence of more serious restrictions.
Nashville, in fact, has the highest number of confirmed cases (293) in the state, according to the city's coronavirus task force chairman. A spokeswoman for Vanderbilt University Medical Center also said that 40 of their health care workers have tested positive so far.
Governor Lee on March 22 ordered bars and restaurants to close for 14 days with the exception of take-out and delivery services. The order also closed gyms, barred most visitors to nursing homes, and prohibited social gatherings of 10 or more people.
The shortage of personal protective equipment should have been a foreseeable problem according to many. “When we have done exercises in the past for pandemic preparedness, supply chain issues were a well-documented challenge,” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist focused on hospital preparedness, told Vox. “This is something we’ve known about — maybe not to this extent, but this isn’t a shocker. It’s more surprising that we let it get this bad.”
This opinion was echoed by Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, who said, “Every serious look at US pandemic readiness and global pandemic readiness has identified PPE shortages as a major issue. This is a known issue. We’ve seen it before.”
The shortage of PPE could be a bigger problem than one can imagine. Val Griffeth, an emergency and critical care doctor, told Vox: “If you have health care workers who don’t feel safe, you may very well have people who don’t come to work. Worse, you have people who come to work, get infected, and end up in the hospital taking up a bed and also not seeing patients that day, that week, or that month.”