U.S. Pandemic Could Severely Strain Face Mask, Other PPE Supply Pipeline

A report from the Institute of Medicine noted, “In the event of pandemic influenza, supplies of effective vaccines and antiviral medications are likely to be inadequate to treat a very large number of affected individuals. Therefore, non-pharmacological interventions will be important, including the use of respiratory protection through respirators or medical masks or both. WHO recommends non-pharmacological interventions that focus on delaying the spread of infection and reducing the impact of the disease. WHO’s recommendations include permitted, but not required, routine mask use by the general public.”²

Masks will be needed to limit or prevent human-to-human transmission of influenza among healthcare providers and members of the general public. And that’s where it becomes dicey. In the past decade, most U.S. face mask sellers have moved their manufacturing operations overseas. A handful of U.S.-based manufacturers remain, and they cannot produce enough masks to protect Americans during an impending pandemic.

The DHHS recognizes that an inadequate stockpile of face masks and other items of personal protective equipment (PPE) could pose a national security threat. How bad could it get? No one really knows, as the utilization of healthcare during a pandemic is mostly suppositions on paper currently. The DHHS pandemic flu plan attempts to characterize the damage, noting, “Pandemic planning is based on the following assumptions about pandemic disease: susceptibility to the pandemic influenza subtype will be universal; the clinical disease attack rate will be 30 percent in the overall population; illness rates will be highest among school-aged children (about 40 percent) and decline with age; among working adults, an average of 20 percent will become ill during a community outbreak; of those who become ill with influenza, 50 percent will seek outpatient medical care. The number of hospitalizations and deaths will depend on the virulence of the pandemic virus. Estimates differ about 10-fold between more and less severe scenarios.”¹