Several Seattle-area medical centers have lowered the protocol for levels of precaution health workers take with personal protective gear when treating confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patients.“This is a global issue,” said Dr. Christopher Baliga, chief of infectious disease at Virginia Mason Medical Center, of the supply problem.
The supply shortages in Seattle highlight what health experts identify as COVID-19’s threat: That regional surges of medical needs stress a nationwide system that experts say operates close to capacity even when there’s not a crisis.
“We run really close to the bone,” said Julie Fischer, an associate research professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Georgetown University Medical Center. “Our systems are pretty fragile. They don’t have a lot of slack, a lot of room, for surging over a long period of time.”
I was thinking about this idea yesterday. So many of the systems upon which we rely are based on the idea that if there is a surge of demand in one part of the system, we can meet it by shifting supply from some other part of the system, like when there is a big storm somewhere and you see fleets of bucket trucks on the highway, traveling to the region from other parts of the country.
That sort of solution doesn’t work when every (or evening multiple) node in the system is getting hit by demand surges at the same time.