Barbara Filippone has been exporting hemp fabric from China for decades, but since the novel coronavirus hit the United States, she’s been putting her Asian connections to work on another popular product: Masks.
Through her business partner in China, she established relationships with factories in Shandong Province and made plans to ship particle-filtering respirators directly to American hospitals. Yet despite dire pleas by nurses for more of these masks, Filippone has been having trouble getting them into health care workers’ hands, Vice News reported.
According to Vice News, two things immediately need to be done, according to these nurses and suppliers: First, President Donald Trump needs to either massively ramp up U.S. respirator production or formally and uniformly ease restrictions on foreign respirators, opening up the Chinese market. Second, hospitals need to start paying up front, instead of using their normal billing practices of paying a month or two down the line.
Hospitals are definitely stretched thin, but they do share some of the blame. Filippone and Wolf, the two respirator suppliers, both said hospitals could make the choice to use the second-tier respirators, liability be damned. Some hospitals, both suppliers said, have come around to that idea just this week.
Hospitals should worry less about the potential lawsuits that could come from acting, she said, and more about the ones that will definitely come if they don’t act now.
