Coronavirus: PPE shortage cost California $93m and dozens of lives, new study finds

At least 15,800 essential workers in California would not have contracted Covid-19 if the state had stockpiled enough personal protective equipment (PPE) prior to the coronavirus pandemic, a new study has claimed.

The UC Berkeley Labour Centre study released on Wednesday also revealed that the state would have saved $93m (£71m) on weekly unemployment claims for healthcare workers if it had prepared a sufficient stockpile.

The study urges California officials to start stockpiling face masks, gloves and other forms of PPE so that it can be prepared for a possible second wave of Covid-19 and any future crisis, according to the Los Angeles Times.

State senators Richard Pan and Connie Leyva are pushing a bill, titled Senate Bill 275, that would force California into creating a statewide stockpile, and they said on Wednesday that the report highlights the urgency that needs to be shown on the issue.

Mr Pan, who represents Sacramento, said that “what this UC Berkeley study shows is the cost of not being ready is very high”, while Chino official Ms Levya said "how do you say, looking at these numbers, we don’t need to do this?” in reference to the bill that is currently making its way through the legislature.

Approximately 251,100 healthcare workers filed an initial unemployment claim in California between 15 March and 11 July, with a majority of them working in outpatient care.

The report claimed that after California suspended elective surgeries and reduced non emergency care, those healthcare workers were unable to work, which cost the state $93m.

California limited the healthcare it provided in order to preserve the levels of PPE it had in stock, so that it could continue to care for coronavirus patients.

The study also claimed that dozens of deaths of essential workers could have been avoided alongside the “conservative estimate” of 15,800 workers who would not have contracted Covid-19, if the state had stockpiled enough PPE.

William Dow, co-author of the report and a professor of Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, said “it was one shocking number after another as I looked at this. Based on these numbers, we should be building a stockpile for the future”.

California stockpiled PPE in 2006, while Arnold schwarzenegger was the state’s governor, in preparation for the Avian Flu, but his successor Jerry Brown removed the funding to properly store the supplies in 2011, the Times reported.

The state then had to pay markups on PPE over the first few months of the pandemic, after the 21 million masks in its stockpile expired and were only approved for low risk settings when the crisis hit the US.

Although California governor Gavin Newsom announced last month that the state will create a stockpile to make sure it is prepared for a possible resurgence of cases later in the year, the bill would extend that beyond the pandemic.

The proposed bill would require the state to create a 90 day supply of PPE over the next five years, with hospitals and other health facilities required to do the same by 2023.

Each facility would be fined $25,000 (£19,181) under the proposed bill, if it did not keep a sufficient inventory of unexpired PPE, according to the Times.

Gabriel Montoya, a member of Service Employees International Union California, which is sponsoring the bill, told the Times that after months of struggling to find enough equipment in his job as a emergency medical technician, he is pleased efforts are being made to prevent a shortage from happening again.

“We can’t wait for the next pandemic to start building the infrastructure to have these supplies,” said Mr Montoya. “We have to start doing that now,” he added.

California has recorded more than 586,000 Covid-19 cases, as at least 10,654 people have died after contracting the virus in the state since the pandemic began.

According to a tracking project hosted by Johns Hopkins University, in the US as a whole, some 5.1 million people have tested positive for coronavirus. The death toll has reached at least 165,531.

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