Vice President Mike Pence teased new developments on ramping up the manufacturing of masks and protective gear for healthcare providers, which will be announced on Monday.
He said in Saturday’s White House press briefing that the government is making progress on “procuring more personal protective equipment and medical supplies, allocating them through the system of FEMA, and continuing to urge conservation by Americans.”
[Click here for complete coronavirus coverage]
The administration is working with private-sector manufacturing companies to boost the number of respirators and N-95 face masks available for healthcare workers to use. Hanes, for instance, will now allocate space in factories to manufacture the masks.
“I’m pleased to report to the president today that HHS just placed an order for hundreds of millions of N-95 masks that will be made available to healthcare providers across the country,” Pence said.
The healthcare industry is seeing a dearth in necessary protective equipment due in part to healthy people buying up products as protective measures. Coronavirus task force members have warned several times, though, that the equipment must be conserved for healthcare workers, as healthy people don’t need them.
“Those [products] are high priority for the healthcare workers who are taking care of people who have coronavirus disease,” said National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci. “So what we don’t want to do, is have a situation where we do have disparities in availability of PPEs now, and we’re working hard to correct that.”
