With the number of coronavirus/COVID-19 cases rising daily, Santa Barbara County residents have stepped up and adjusted their operations to help prepare frontline health care workers for a surge in patients.
The push to collect medical supplies began this past week when Cottage Health employees began staffing an outdoor drop-off center for donations in the parking lot of Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital.
The community response was immediate.
More than 10,000 N95 masks and more than 12,000 surgical masks were donated Tuesday, according to Brett Tande, Cottage Health’s chief financial officer.
N95s and surgical masks were the most commonly donated items, and new and sealed supplies are almost always suitable for clinical use, he said. Masks, respirators, isolation gowns and other personal protective equipment are essential supplies to keep health care providers safe, Tande said.
Several masks, respirators and other supplies that were donated on Tuesday went directly into Cottage Health’s hospitals to protect medical staff battling the novel coronavirus, he said.
Cottage Health has more than 35,000 N95 respirators and more than 800,000 gloves, according to Tande.
“These inventory levels would normally be sufficient for more than a year of operations under normal conditions, but COVID-19 is not a normal environment,” Tande said. “Our use of N95s has risen from 25 per day to more than 600 per day.”
Face shields are in short supply, he said, and Cottage Health has partnered with several individuals and companies in the community to manufacture the supplies locally.
Leaders at Cottage Health are working with chemical engineers, microbiologists and others to research, develop and implement safe and effective ways to decontaminate personal protective equipment, Tande said.
“Keeping our staff safe with PPE (personal protective equipment) slows the spread of COVID-19, and it enables our team to be available and focused on continuing to deliver excellent care,” Tande said. Personal protective equipment “has been and will continue to be in high demand.”
Cottage Health officials are hopeful that social distancing, which the county enacted before the first confirmed coronavirus case, will help slow the rate of spread, Tande said.
“We do expect hospitalizations related to COVID-19 to increase, and the use of hospital beds and equipment such as ventilators to increase,” Tande told Noozhawk.
Cottage Health is not at critical risk of running out of supplies, Tande said Thursday afternoon, but officials are working to secure supplies of personal protective equipment and other equipment for the long-term.
“It’s uncertain how COVID-19 will progress in Santa Barbara County and how severe the symptoms will be,” he said. “We continue to hope for the best and plan for the worst to ensure our health workers and community are protected.”
On Friday morning, donors drove up, rolled down their car windows and dropped off sealed items. Some people filled their vehicle trunks with donations, and others emptied bags of supplies.
Many doctors and nurses across the country are facing a shortage in protective gear needed to safely help coronavirus patients.
Local businesses, organizations, nonprofits and other agencies across the county gifted supplies that will be ready if needed in the future.
Several local groups, even those unassociated and not directly linked to the health care field or medical research, contributed vital medical supplies. The Santa Barbara Chinese School led a fundraiser and collection of face masks and other protective gear, along with a team of volunteers.
Community members quickly joined together and helped out.
Volunteers dropped off about 650 items, including 360 N95 masks and 250 pairs of gloves, plus isolation gowns and eye shields to Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital and Sansum Clinic.
“That’s only the first portion of the donation,” Santa Barbara Chinese School Principal Wenjing Chen said, adding that about $15,000 in donations had been raised for about 2,500 N95 masks, as well as 1,300 procedure masks and 1,000 face shields slated to arrive from China in a week or two.
Community members are committed to helping health care workers on the coronavirus front lines, Chen said, and plan to continue to assist for as long as hospitals or other organizations need.
“The reason why we are doing this is pretty simple,” Chen said. “For the Santa Barbara Chinese group, Santa Barbara is our second home, and now the local medical staff workers are working hard on the front line to protect us.”
The support has extended far beyond local response.
“Even Chinese people from mainland China donated money or supplies to support our local medical workers,” Chen said. “People working together can make a huge difference.”
SDL Laser in Goleta recently contributed 20 masks and 300 nitrile gloves to Sansum Clinic.
Direct Relief, a Santa Barbara-based humanitarian aid organization, delivered 12,000 N95 masks to Cottage Health, Sansum Clinic and Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics.
Westmont College supplied 1,000 N95 masks to Santa Barbara Cottage Health’s medical personnel.
The Goleta Union School District also stepped up to help address potential shortages of personal protective equipment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Both Westmont and GUSD kept a supply of face masks on hand to protect the campus community from smoke and ash during wildfires.
GUSD board member Susan Epstein recently began facilitating getting excess protective gear to health care workers from individuals, agencies and businesses.
“I just kind of jumped in and started calling all the agencies,” Epstein said.
The school district donated 1,000 N95 masks to Cottage Hospital. The GUSD campuses are shut to students to mitigate the spread of the virus, so the face mask supplies are going unused.
“People are figuring out ways to help out,” Epstein said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Brooke Holland can be reached at bholland@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
