Tuesday October 6th @ 10:00pm on WGVU Public Television - PBS FRONTLINE presents America’s Medical Supply Crisis examining why the United States was left scrambling for critical medical equipment as the coronavirus pandemic swept the county.
WGVU spoke with documentary’s correspondent.
“There’s a failure in the system it creates sheer and utter chaos.”
Narrator: “The coronavirus has exposed weaknesses in America’s medical supply chain.”
“It was early March when we first saw images of nurses wearing garbage bags.”
Martha Mendoza is correspondent of PBS FRONTLINE’s America’s Medical Supply Crisis.
“Right away we understood why this was happening because we could see that in January imports from China of N95 masks, of gowns, rubber gloves from elsewhere in Asia have been pretty robust and in kind of late February and into March shipments didn't come. So, we can look and see here's 25 shipping containers, full of that stuff coming on this particular ship to this particular port and all of a sudden there were no imports of those items coming into the ports of America. And so, what we began to learn that is that the medical supply chains, the fragile life lines between the raw materials and manufacturers overseas and the health care workers on the frontlines of U.S. were failing.”
FRONTLINE and the Associated Press investigate.
FRONTLINE’s America’s Medical Supply Crisis airs Tuesday, October 6th @ 10:00pm on WGVU Public Television.