I got up early this morning and lined up at Walmart in Española, New Mexico in my pajamas to buy supplies to make masks for our health care workers. A few of you old-timers might remember me even though I haven’t posted in awhile. I am the Health and Human Services Director for a mostly Hispanic and Native American ranching community in northern New Mexico.
Back in the day, I blogged about health care.
Today, I am organizing my community to support our first responders and health care providers. I convened all of our Federally Qualified Health Centers (i.e., FQHCs or, in lay terms, federally funded primary care clinics). While our hospital has enough N-95 masks and other Personal Protective Equipment (or PPE) to last a few months at normal levels of care, the first responders and clinics informed me they had no masks at all. So we set about looking for masks.
Our County EMS Director, Alfredo Montoya, and I tried to buy masks for them, but our best efforts proved underwhelming. Even though we failed to follow proper procurement procedure, we were only able to score a few boxes of masks.
Then a miracle occurred! Tomas Campos, our County Manager, found a stockpile of N-95s in storage. Ten years ago, during the H1N1 (swine flu) scare, we received technical assistance from two emergency planning experts with Homeland Security. We ran tabletop exercises and I talked the EMS director into ordering a stockpile of masks.
The swine flu petered out and we forgot all about the masks. They hibernated in storage for a decade until Tomas remembered them and distributed them to our first responders and clinics.
This time we were on our own. There were no federal visitors telling us what to do. Alfredo found the plan we had developed a decade ago and dusted it off. We all remembered what we’d rehearsed. Trump and his friends might be busy profiteering, but that doesn't mean rural New Mexico can't come together in a crisis.
Our clinics asked us if we could make them cloth masks to place over the masks they now had in order to extend the life of the manufactured masks. Without a cloth masks, the paper masks have to be replaced after each use. With them, they can last five days. So now I was at Wally Mart at 7 am in my pajamas buying fabric and other supplies.
While there, I ran into the Planning and Zoning Director for the City of Española, and my brother and sister-in-law. Chris volunteered to help sew masks!
I also ran into Cynthia Martinez-Barela, a Facebook friend. She bought some cloth for me. Thank you Cynthia!
Customers were only allowed to buy one of each thing, and one little packet of elastic wasn't nearly enough. Fortunately, when I told the Walmart team what I was doing, they allowed me to bundle two bolts of fabric into one packet, and two bolts of interfacing as well. And they let me take about ten packets of elastic. It wasn’t enough to meet the need, but it's what I could do.
I broadcasted my daily Corona Update on KDCE radio from Walmart and explained why I was there. Two more seamstresses volunteered to pitch in as a result of the broadcast: Winnie Lamartine from White Rock and Pamela Manzanares from Española.
Winnie's daughter is a doctor at El Centro Family Health, and she had already been sewing masks. Now she's getting all her seamstress friends to join in the fun!
Several local foundations are looking into providing emergency funding to buy supplies.
If you'll notice, I chose cotton fabric that looks like a bandana. This is to protest the recent egregious CDC guidance to health care workers to wrap bandanas around their faces in lieu of masks. I figured the docs, nurses and other clinic staff would enjoy the joke.
Cloth masks are not effective on their own and are not an industry standard. Nobody should think that wearing a cloth mask, or any mask, is a substitute for sheltering in place, and we are being very clear with our messaging to the public. The current round of masks is to extend the use of protective equipment for our providers so that it will last until the federal stockpile is finally released. I'm hoping to make at least ten masks per worker so they can swap them out during the day and then launder them for re-use.
I want our providers and first responders to feel loved. If you have a sewing machine and want to help, message me! We're in this together. We just posted our facebook page. We are calling ourselves Rosie the Respirators.
I am also asking our health care workers to wear a sticker reading "I counted" in exchange for the masks. I want them to encourage their patients to fill out the census. Our outreach efforts have been severely disrupted by our inability to gather. Instead of holding events, we will be phone-banking from our individual homes, conducting telephonic well-neighbor checks while encouraging people to fill out the census.
We are asking them to post “I counted!” on Facebook after they finish to encourage everyone to count. Our ability to respond locally to disasters is directly related to federal funding. The chronic undercount in our community hampers the ability of our federally funded clinics (which are our only clinics) to purchase masks and other needed supplies.
You can help us to create a census movement by going to www.Census2020.gov and taking ten minutes to respond. Then post about your experience on Facebook and encourage your friends (sort of like the ice water challenge without any discomfort).
I know our efforts to equip our medical personnel cannot make up for the failure of the federal government to mobilize. But I do believe the we are forming social networks and creating the social capital that makes us strong.
We can win this war by being good people. Worship the God of Justice by being just and being joyful!