In a mostly planned but still fortuitous development, the Chicago Department of Public Health had quietly collected a deep store of such material in recent years, Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady disclosed in an interview. And it’s been sharing that PPE with hospitals, nursing homes and a few homeless shelters.
The city so far has drawn down and sent out 501,000 of the very hard-to-find N95 masks, according to Arwady’s office,
even as other officials gripe that they can’t get enough. An additional 720,000 have been reserved for possible use in the
emergency hospital facility at McCormick Place. That still leaves more than half of the city’s original stock of 3.9 million as the pandemic continues to unfold.
“We talk to the hospitals every single day” to see what they need, Arwady said. “We’re situated a lot better than a lot of other places.”
The city also has distributed 2.4 million sets of gloves, 124,000 protective gowns and 1.2 million other masks, she said. And more is coming in all the time, since the city continues to receive regular orders from suppliers with which it has had long-standing relationships.