Hunt for medical gear to fight virus turns all-consuming

Fears grew that densely crowded New York could become one of the world’s biggest coronavirus hotspots, prompting cancellations of everything from play dates to picnics in the park to pickup basketball games. The city’s mayor said hospitals were 10 days away from shortages in “really basic supplies” that seriously endangered healthcare workers and patients.

“If we don’t get the equipment, we’re literally going to lose lives,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told CNN. A surge in infections has caused a critical shortage of medical supplies in many places. Italy has already seen 18 doctors with coronavirus die and Spain says 12% of its nearly 29,000 cases are medical workers.

To combat this, Spain erected a field hospital in a convention centre. British health workers pleaded for more gear, saying they felt like “cannon fodder.” US President Donald Trump ordered mobile hospital centres be sent to Washington, California and New York. In France, doctors scrounged masks from the unlikeliest of places — an architect, construction workers in Breton, factory floors.

“There’s a wild race to get surgical masks,” François Blanchecott, a biologist on the front lines of testing, told France Inter radio. “We’re asking mayors’ offices, industries, any enterprises that might have a store of masks.”

Healthcare workers say they are being asked to reuse and ration disposable masks and gloves. A shortage of ventilators, crucial for treating serious cases, has become critical. A political battle over ventilators has emerged, especially after Trump told state governors to go find their own medical equipment and some replied that was not the best solution.

China has been the one nation to counter this trend, sending plane-loads of medical equipment like masks, gloves and protective gear as well as doctors to countries across Europe, including hard-hit Italy, France and Spain as well as countries with weaker medical systems like Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia.

Markets reopened to an altered business landscape as lockdowns and closures intended to halt the spread of the new coronavirus expanded over the weekend to include many cities around the world and the number of people infected surged.

Worldwide, over 341,000 people have been infected and over 14,700 have died from the virus that first emerged in central China late last year. As cases in China ebbed, the dangers to Europe and the U.S. have grown exponentially, although Germany on Monday cautiously reported some flattening of its infection curve. After just weeks, the US has more than 33,000 cases and more than 400 deaths.

India’s prime minister asked, with mixed results, his nation of 1.3 bn people to stay home. An untold number of burials are going forward around the world with nothing more than a priest, a funeral home staffer and one loved one to bear witness. While other countries struggled to contain the virus, the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus outbreak emerged and the first metropolitan area be locked down, said Monday it is now allowing residents limited movement, both within the city and out, as its months-long lockdown gradually eases.