WASHINGTON – Hospitals everywhere have been experiencing supply shortages due to winter storms and travel delays.
Having COVID-19 cases rise in the last couple weeks has caused a domino effect with may hospitals across the nation not being able to get shipments of supplies for COVID tests.
“We ran into some challenges with the snow and the pass closures where we recently had to do a bunch of pre-procedure testing that we don’t normally have to do and that put a big tax on our supplies because that’s not what we intended that supply to be for.” said Dr. Marty Brueggemann the Chief Medical Officer for Yakima Memorial Hospital.
Yakima Memorial says they are okay for now on their supplies for testing but that could change.
“We have supplies that we use internally test patients, to get admitted you know things like that and so far we’ve been okay but again we get an allocation based on what our anticipated need is” said Brueggemann.
Since the pandemic has continued with cases rising, that need might overwhelm the hospital.
“What we don’t have the supply for is for the community starting to come into our yard expecting us to do community testing for them because that will quickly overwhelm our supply” said Brueggemann.
Other medical centers have already felt the heat of the omicron variant.
“For the past 12 weeks we’ve seen an increase of 34 percent in our test demand, it was very significant” said David Jansen, Region Executive for the laboratory Services for Providence Medical Center. “In fact this past week I’ve noticed that the test volume was the highest it’s been in the pandemic and it’s been going up every week.”
The delivery side has been struggling because they don’t have enough staff.
“The biggest challenge that we’ve had with the supply the shippers” said Jansen. “Our suppliers, you know they contract out with Fedex, UPS and other shippers and they’re being hit with COVID and that’s impacting their staffing. So we’ve been seeing big delays with some of our shipments or supplies either sitting on a tarmac or they’re not taking off because they don’t have an eligible pilot.”
By having that domino effect with COVID rising into all parts of the industry, its made it harder for the medical field to get the supplies they need, so they are asking people to please be patient with them.
