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New York’s emergency rooms are running out of the one thing keeping doctors alive: masks.
By late March 2020, New York City had become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, accounting for roughly 30 percent of the nation’s confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than a quarter of its deaths. Inside city hospitals, doctors and nurses describe a war zone where beds, ICUs, and morgues are overrun — and where the gear meant to protect them from the virus is running out.
NBC News spoke with frontline physicians and nurses who say they’re being forced to reuse single-use N95 respirators for days at a time, storing them in paper bags between shifts because there’s nothing else to replace them with. Some describe the terror of feeling “COVID on my face” during intubations and other aerosol-generating procedures performed without adequate facial protection.
- New York City accounts for roughly 30% of all U.S. COVID-19 cases and more than a quarter of U.S. deaths as of late March 2020.
- Staff are reusing single-use N95 masks for multiple days and storing them in paper bags between shifts due to PPE shortages.
- Colleagues are falling critically ill and requiring mechanical ventilation alongside the patients they were treating.
Improvising Protection on the Fly
With hospitals unable to keep pace with demand for N95 respirators, surgical masks, face shields, and gowns, some clinicians have started building their own equipment. Physicians have fabricated homemade acrylic intubation boxes and makeshift face covers, trying to engineer barriers between themselves and infectious aerosols that the supply chain simply isn’t providing.
The shortage isn’t confined to masks. Gowns and gloves are being rationed across units, and nurses say they’re washing and re-wearing gear that was never designed to survive a single shift, let alone a week. The result, according to workers who spoke to NBC News, is a workforce operating far outside standard infection-control protocols just to keep the doors open.
COVID on my face.
Colleagues Falling Ill, Wards Losing Staff
The consequence of inadequate protective gear has been infection within the ranks. Doctors and nurses are watching coworkers get sick and, in some cases, end up intubated in the same ICUs where they once worked. That’s compounding the staffing crisis at exactly the moment hospitals need every available set of hands, leaving remaining teams stretched thinner as case counts climb.
That dynamic — overwhelmed staff, dwindling reinforcements, and a virus that doesn’t wait for supply chains to catch up — mirrors what’s been reported as schools and other institutions across the country began grappling with the same math of risk versus capacity in the early weeks of the outbreak.
The #GetMePPE Campaign
Facing what amounts to a battlefield shortage, medical professionals have turned to public appeals, organizing under hashtags like #GetMePPE and launching grassroots donation efforts such as getusppe.org to solicit gear directly from local businesses and community members. The American Medical Association has pressed the federal government to invoke the Defense Production Act to force mass manufacturing of PPE and ventilators before hospital systems buckle entirely.
The scramble for equipment has played out alongside a broader reckoning over state-by-state restrictions aimed at slowing transmission enough to buy hospitals time to restock. For now, though, the doctors and nurses NBC News interviewed say the equipment isn’t arriving fast enough, and they’re treating patients — and each other’s illnesses — with whatever they can scrounge together on a given shift.
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