Nurses protest lack of PPE's and enforcement of social distancing protocols at Rikers Island

 

NY Post

Frontline nurses at the notorious Rikers Island jail say they are struggling to treat inmates who don’t even have enough soap and running water to keep the coronavirus at bay.

Social distancing is not enforced at the jail, and there is a dangerous shortage of protective gear and test kits, nurses complained at a rally there on Thursday.

“Let me tell you something — COVID has hit hard beyond these walls,” said Rikers nurse Neshia McDonald, one of 30 nurses to march outside the jail.

“We are Rikers nurses, and we’re asking the public, please, we are doing the job that people are not lining up to do. And we are asking for your help.”

Nurses at the jail are mourning colleague William Chen, who McDonald said died after a COVID-19 patient threw up on him.

“This is not about coffee, donuts,” she said. “This is not about ‘Likes.’ This is reality. We’re asking you to keep us in your prayers because we are working.”

Department of Homeless Services supplies city workers with garbage bags to wear to move homeless people's belongings

 

NY Post
 Department of Homeless Services laborers tasked with helping move the Big Apple’s least fortunate in and out of shelters are wearing trash bags to protect themselves from the coronavirus — as they demand additional protection from city officials.
The members of AFSCME District 37 Local 924 shot the photos as they moved a family from a Bronx shelter and submitted them to DHS officials to support their claims they need protective bodysuits to remain safe during the coronavirus pandemic.
“At the end of the day, you need to protect yourself by any means necessary and you have to put garbage bags around you to do that, you need to do that,” said Local 924 President Kyle Simmons. “If you’re going to do the job, you’ve got to protect yourself — or do the best you can.”
Simmons says his members need protective gowns for their clothing, commonly known as Tyvek suits, to stay safe while working with the homeless and moving their belongings.
The city, he says, has refused to provide them for the laborers while giving them to other employees.

Film production set team builds and donates intubators under supplied hospitals

Brooklyn Paper

A team of film and television set builders are using their carpentry skills to build life-saving equipment for struggling hospitals. 

Greenpoint set builder Bret Lehne learned about the need for intubation boxes — plexiglass containers that keep doctors safe during the most dangerous moments of operation — when a doctor friend contacted him a week into the pandemic asking if he knew anyone who could make them. After reviewing the schematics, Lehne came to a realization.

“This, both in material and in complexity, is an average blueprint that I might get in a workday,” he said to himself. “I know an entire industry that can build these.”

With set workshops empty due to social distancing guidelines, Lehne first had to search for a space that would allow him and a team of volunteers to work there for free, eventually landing on the training workshop of the IATSE Local 52 Studio Mechanics Union in Queens.

Federal regulations for nursing homes to prepare for coronavirus spread were implemented in February

Queens County Politics
 
President Donald Trump‘s administration has been warning states in a number of memorandums since as early as Feb. 6 to prepare the nation’s nursing homes for the COVID-19 threat, KCP has learned.

But despite the numerous warnings and memorandums from the Trump administration to be better prepared, scores of people in nursing homes have died around the borough, leaving the dead in the facilities for days, families unnotified and nursing homes workers complaining of not having personal protective equipment (PPE).


The documented proof of Trump administration and warnings and declarations was presented yesterday following the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announcement of new regulatory requirements that will require nursing homes to inform residents, their families and representatives of COVID-19 cases in their facilities.


In addition, as part of Trump’s Opening Up America, CMS will now require nursing homes to report cases of COVID-19 directly to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).


This information must be reported in accordance with existing privacy regulations and statute. This measure augments longstanding requirements for reporting infectious disease to State and local health departments. Finally, CMS will also require nursing homes to fully cooperate with CDC surveillance efforts around COVID-19 spread.


“Nursing homes have been ground zero for COVID-19. Today’s action supports CMS’ longstanding commitment to providing transparent and timely information to residents and their families,” said CMS Administrator Seema Verma. “Nursing home reporting to the CDC is a critical component of the go-forward national COVID-19 surveillance system and to efforts to reopen America.”


The CMS first memorandum issued on February 6, warned healthcare facilities to the threat of the 2019-Novel Coronavirus and advised health care providers and State Survey Agencies (SAs), the entities that inspect healthcare facilities, including nursing homes, to ensure compliance with current CMS requirements and safety standards.

Contractor Gadget has come up short on PPE supplies

THE CITY 

Nearly 13 million virus-blocking N95 and similar face masks ordered in March for the city’s public hospitals and other emergency services have still not arrived as medical staff at Bellevue and other facilities plead for protective supplies.

Of the nearly 34 million masks contracted for between March 6 and April 11 by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, only 637,760 had been received as of Friday, according to the department.

Also still missing are at least 2,000 ventilators purchased last month, toward which City Hall paid $9 million — even as Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced plans to ship hundreds of surplus ventilators to other states combating coronavirus.

None of the two million N95 masks secured in a March 25 contract with a New Jersey company called Digital Gadgets have been delivered, according to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which signed the $8 million deal.

Out of a March 28 deal for six million similar KN95 masks with the same firm, just 137,760 have come in so far, DCAS reports.

The Digital Gadgets masks are “designated as medical and are intended for use by Health + Hospitals,” a DCAS spokesperson told THE CITY.

The Health and Hospitals Corporation told THE CITY it has 745,000 N95 masks on hand.

In all, a review of city contract records indicates, vendors have delivered N95-type masks in just two out of 14 DCAS emergency contracts made between March 6 and April 11.

And only one company, Tivuna Systems Inc., has produced its goods in full, providing 500,000 KN95 masks in a deal signed by DCAS on April 2.

Most of those companies, including Digital Gadgets, had never before done business with the City of New York. Under an emergency order issued March 16 by Mayor Bill de Blasio, those contracts and companies bypassed standard reviews by the city contracts office and comptroller.

“Estimated delivery dates are constantly shifting due to overall demand and supplier manufacturing capacity,” said Nick Benson, the spokesperson for DCAS. “There is not a fixed delivery date for these or most of the COVID-19 related orders.”

On Sunday, de Blasio hinted at a news conference of troubling delays in delivery of crucial supplies.

“We have a huge number of orders out around the world that if we started to see a little more consistency on the deliveries, we would be in much better shape,” he said.

For weeks, nurses have railed against the dangerous conditions inside the city’s 11 public hospitals where they say they’ve been forced to care for a wave of virus patients without proper protective gear.

 Eventually, de Blasio will make it up to all these hospitals with more clapping, donuts and coffee.

Nurses and funeral home directors are pissed about the bureaucratic bullshit affecting their jobs from the state and city

 

NY Post

 New York State nurses and other hospital workers are being exposed to “dangerous working conditions” amid the coronavirus pandemic because of “critical shortages” of personal protective gear, and they want “urgent action” from Gov. Andrew Cuomo to provide them with the equipment they need.

 That’s the message in a blistering April 11 letter sent by the New York State Nurses Association’s director to Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, obtained by The Post.

The letter contradicts comments made by Melissa de Rosa, secretary to Gov. Cuomo, at a press briefing last week, in which she said that hospitals were receiving stockpiled PPE equipment and that no health care facilities in the state would have to resort to “crisis conservation.”

That means the reusing of masks, hospital gowns and other equipment meant to guard against the spread of COVID-19.

“At this point most hospitals and nursing homes in the New York City metropolitan area, which is the national epicenter of the pandemic, continue to operate under ‘crisis conservation’ standards because they do not have enough PPE to distribute to our desperate staff,” wrote Patricia Kane, the executive director of the Nurses Association, the union which represents 42,000 frontline nurses in the state.

NY Post

Frazzled funeral home directors are complaining about the invasion of the municipal body snatchers.
At least two Queens funeral directors say the city’s red tape is making their grim backlog of bodies even worse, as remains are sent to Randall’s Island for storage with little or no notice — and retrieving them has become nearly impossible.

Omar Rodriguez was scheduled to pick up two bodies last week from Elmhurst Hospital, only to find out the night before they’d been packed into two mobile morgues and taken to Randall’s Island.
But once there, workers on the island told him the bodies needed to go back to the hospital before they could be released, he said.

“I spoke to everybody and their mothers about how to get the bodies but no one had an answer,” he told The Post. “I was going back-and-forth. I told them I’m here, release the bodies to me. Eight hours later they were released on Randall’s Island.”

Mayor de Blasio has avoided a health clinic CEO's charitable request to provide PPE supplies

NY Post

New York City is desperately pleading for healthcare workers and equipment for the fight against the coronavirus — but a local doctor who has offered his network of 600 beds and 100 physicians said city and state bureaucrats have ignored him.

Dr. Yan Katsnelson said he’s been trying for weeks to get the offices of Mayor Bill de Blasio, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the city and state health departments to take him up on his offer.

His 30 temporarily closed health clinics — equipped with 5,000-plus masks and oxygen machines — are collecting dust, he said, while overwhelmed local hospitals are forced to treat patients in hallways and waiting-room chairs.

“De Blasio said right now I will take beds anywhere and everywhere. What the hell is he talking about?” said Katsnelson, claiming his staff contacted City Hall “several times” in the last two weeks offering to take in COVID-19 patients or relieve hospitals of non-coronavirus patients.

“My CEO is desperate to offer a helping hand with our equipped medical facilities and physicians, [nurse practitioners] and [physician assistants],” a Katsnelson employee wrote in a March 19 email to city Health Department Assistant Commissioner Jennifer Rakeman, state Bureau of Communicable Disease Control director Daniel Kuhles, state Division of Epidemiology director Debra Blog, and others.

The employee also spoke briefly to de Blasio aide Freddi Goldstein later that day. She also contacted the governor’s office, said Katsnelson, a Chicago-based cardiovascular surgeon who owns a national network of vascular and fibroid clinics.

They haven’t heard back since mid-March.

“Telephone calls were made … voice mails were left and not returned,” the employee said of the city and state runaround.

New York is getting played for chumps trying to get medical equipment and supplies

Propublica

With the coronavirus outbreak creating an unprecedented demand for medical supplies and equipment, New York state has paid 20 cents for gloves that normally cost less than a nickel and as much as $7.50 each for masks, about 15 times the usual price. It’s paid up to $2,795 for infusion pumps, more than twice the regular rate. And $248,841 for a portable X-ray machine that typically sells for $30,000 to $80,000.

This payment data, provided by state officials, shows just how much the shortage of key medical equipment is driving up prices. Forced to venture outside their usual vendors and contracts, states and cities are paying exorbitant sums on a spot market ruled by supply and demand. Although New York’s attorney general has denounced excessive prices, and ordered merchants to stop overcharging people for hand sanitizers and disinfectant sprays, state laws against price gouging generally don’t apply to government purchases.

With little guidance from the Trump administration, competition among states, cities, hospitals and federal agencies is contributing to the staggering bill for fighting the pandemic, which New York has estimated will cost it $15 billion in spending and lost revenue. The bidding wars are also raising concerns that facilities with shallow pockets, like rural health clinics, won’t be able to obtain vital supplies.

As the epicenter of the pandemic, with about 40% of the nation’s coronavirus cases, New York state is especially desperate for medical equipment, no matter what the tab. “We know that New York and other states are in the market at the same time, along with the rest of the world, bidding on these same items, which is clearly driving the fluctuation in costs,” budget office spokesman Freeman Klopott said in an email.

The Office of General Services, New York’s main procurement agency, declined to say which sellers were inflating prices for essential medical gear. “At this moment in time the New York State team is focused on procuring goods and services based on current market conditions,” OGS spokeswoman Heather Groll wrote in an email. “There will be time to look back and pull together info on all this, that time will be when the pandemic is over.”

President Trump sends protective supplies to the NYPD after they begged for it.

NY Post

 White House officials sprung into action on Monday after receiving an “SOS” email from the NYPD begging for protective equipment — delivering the frontline gear just 16 hours later, The Post has learned.

In a mission dubbed “Operation Blue Bloods,” President Donald Trump’s equipment czar Peter Navarro, Assistant to the President for Trade and Manufacturing Policy, cobbled together a rapid-response team including company executives who flew thousands of full-body suits on a private plane the next day.

More than 6,000 gallons of hand sanitizer donated by alcohol company Pernod Ricard were also rushed from Arizona by a USPS trucker in 48 hours.

With a mounting number of bodies left in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, reports have emerged of homicide detectives being forced to make house calls without the correct protective equipment — potentially exposing them to the virus.

A desperate email from NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan asking for gear to protect Big Apple Finest — of whom more than 1,400 have tested positive for COVID-19 — landed in Navarro’s inbox on Monday, he said.

After being named the national Defense Production Act coordinator last week, Navarro called on executives at defense companies Raytheon and General Dynamics, and Pernod Richard, to step up.

 I just want to add one more thing to this post.


Navarro said the mission was an example of private companies heeding the call during the pandemic which has so far infected more than 216,000 people in the U.S. and killed over 5,100, according to Johns Hopkins University.

“What we’ve been trying to do under President Trump’s leadership is to wed the full force of federal government with the full power of private enterprise,” he said.

Is the Trump administration acknowledging...socialism???