Coronavirus in Oregon: As safety supplies dwindle, crafters step in to fill the gap

It was only a week ago that Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said health care providers in Oregon were dangerously close to running out of protective equipment amid a global pandemic.

Anne Jin, a 47-year-old teacher who lives in Northeast Portland, saw the dire warning and asked her husband, an infectious disease physician, how serious the problem was.

“People need to start making masks,” he told her.

Jin went to a fabric store that night to get material and elastic. The next day, she got on Facebook and started asking people she knew to get involved with making masks. After an hour of responding to people privately, she realized she needed to start a group. “Crafters Against Covid-19 *PDX*” had about 100 members by the end of the day. When she woke up the next morning, it was up to 300.

By midday Tuesday, Jin and a few other administrators were overseeing an army of more than 7,000 sewers, crafters and makers, all looking to ply their trade to stave off the shortage in supplies.

As the coronavirus has spread across the globe, with nearly half a million cases worldwide and more than 50,000 in the U.S., the lack of supplies has become one of the most pressing needs. With demand so great, groups like Jin’s have popped up all over the country, a grassroots effort to fill the gap left by bureaucratic inefficiency and poor planning by both governments and hospitals.

Soon after Brown made her dire warning, the governor ordered all nonessential medical procedures canceled or postponed to conserve equipment. She issued a plea for donations, asking medical professionals, contractors and the public to look through their supply closets for anything that could help the people treating coronavirus patients on a daily basis. Brown requested shipments of equipment from the federal government but has only received a fraction of what the state needs and, on Wednesday, the governor put the blame for the shortage squarely on the shoulders of the Trump administration.

“The question is, what’s the barrier? From our perspective, from what we’re seeing, it’s frankly the federal government,” Brown said. “This outrageous lack of action will result in lost lives.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control relaxed standards for personal protective equipment, telling health care workers that, in crisis scenarios when no other option is available, scarves or bandanas can be used in place of medical masks.

But supplies remain dangerously low. As of Tuesday, the state had gone through 80 % of the non-expired N95 masks in its stockpile, according to the Oregon Health Authority.

A nurse in central Oregon reported using the same mask for three weeks. A nurse who works at a Portland-area hospital reported being instructed to keep their mask in a paper bag between treating patients. Some nurses at Oregon Health and Science University have started using swim goggles when no other eye protection was available.

“We’re days from running out, and we haven’t even hit the surge yet,” said Adrienne Enghouse, president of the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, which represents 5,000 frontline healthcare workers. “No one knows when the last mask is going to be used.”

The lack of safety equipment is dangerous, said one nurse who works at a Kaiser facility in Northwest Oregon, but the danger extends beyond frontline doctors and nurses. As equipment is stretched far beyond the limits of its intended use, the risk to health care workers increases. If they get infected, even fewer people will be available to care for the sick.

But given the risk of spreading the coronavirus before symptoms develop, the lack of safety equipment also increases the danger to patients who come to hospitals.

“All the frontline workers are going to become vectors,” said the nurse, who asked not be named.

That terrifying scenario is what spurred Jin into action. Her group does not make the highly sought after N95 respirators, which have tight seals and can filter up to 95% of small microbes. Instead, the group is working off a simpler template, crafting something akin to surgical masks that are given to patients who may be infected. They are intended to prevent patient-to-patient transmission, freeing up more masks for healthcare workers.

She’s gotten guidance from doctors throughout the nation and locally from Paul Lewis, deputy health officer for Multnomah County. The group adheres to strict standards — everyone works from the same pattern, and there are detailed instructions on cleaning workspaces and guidelines for what types of fabric is acceptable.

“We didn’t want people using old socks or yoga pants,” Jin said.

When the masks are finished, crafters bag them and put them in a box along with a note indicating who made the masks, their phone number and the type of material used. The box is sealed, and the outside is labeled with the number of masks and the date they were made. Lewis has facilitated a deal to have the masks donated to the county for distribution.

Jin isn’t the only one heeding the call for personal protective equipment. Britt Howard, founder of the Portland Garment Factory, a small textile contractor in the Montavilla neighborhood, started seeing her business slow as social distancing measures went into place. She knew her 13-person operation could produce masks, and they had all the material on hand.

By Monday, Howard had fully converted the factory to mask production, pumping out an estimated 700 masks in three patterns. She hopes to produce a minimum of 2,500 a week.

“I’m getting emails from doctors that they don't have what they need,” Howard said. “It's ridiculous. Let's get them the masks.”

At the Santiam Hospital, a rural 40-bed facility southeast of Salem, service integration coordinator Melissa Baurer said they anticipated running out of some equipment in the coming weeks. Baurer is helping prepare fabric and patterns to distribute to the community for gowns and masks that can be made at home.

The call for donations has worked, too. Several Southwest Washington school districts came up with nearly 150 boxes of gloves and almost 2,000 masks of various types. The Beaverton School District dug through their now-empty science classrooms and came up with similar numbers that it donated to Portland-area hospitals. Companies, government entities and individuals from throughout the region have rallied to provide for the caregivers who provide for the sick.

WHERE TO DONATE PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT IN OREGON

As the pandemic has unfolded and much of society has been told to stay home in isolation, feelings of helplessness have followed. But the social distancing measures put in place have left many with a formerly scarce resource: time.

“This is a weird perfect storm for this to be happening,” Jin said. “You have a lot of idle hands and a depressing situation. If they can do something to help, it’s very comforting.”

Still, the fact that medical professionals are being forced to rely on donated gloves and makeshift masks represents a vast failure of the system, according to Enghouse, the union president.

“This is like watching a slow-moving trainwreck,” she said. “There has been inaction at every pivotal opportunity. They are asking us to face a battle without armor or a weapon.”

-- Kale Williams; kwilliams@oregonian.com; 503-294-4048; @sfkale

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