As the coronavirus crisis deepened in April, Georgia officials circulated documents showing that to get through the next month, the state would need millions more masks, gowns and other supplies than it had on hand.
The projections, obtained by Kaiser Health News and other organizations in response to public records requests, provide one of the clearest pictures of the severe PPE deficits states confronted while thousands fell ill from rising COVID-19 cases, putting health workers at risk.
Georgia on April 19 had 932,620 N95 respirator masks — one of the best protections for health workers against infection — and expected to burn through nearly 7 million within a month. It urgently needed to buy 1.4 million more, according to documents obtained by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and shared with KHN. For gowns, officials expected to go through 16.1 million in 30 days, a staggering amount compared with the 21,810 the state had at the time.
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