The efforts by the state of Washington to secure equipment for Covid testing continue to be spotty. State officials say the federal government sent only a fraction of the promised supplies in May.
Meanwhile, a Spokane Native health leader says she’s also having difficulty getting the test equipment her clinic needs.
Reed Schuler leads the work to secure Covid testing and personal protective equipment for the state of Washington. He’s a senior adviser to the governor.
For a few weeks, in briefings with reporters, he’s been less than complimentary about how the federal government has fulfilled its promises to provide equipment, especially testing swabs.
“We’ve received some messy and unlabeled shipments from the federal government, so we’re doing a variety of work to ensure we know exactly what we received. It’s been a difficult process to track incoming materials and then assess inventory and do quality control on what we did receive. We likely received on the order of two-thirds of the swabs that the federal government told Washington that we would be getting," Schuler said.
He says the state is anticipating more supply coming from commercial vendors. The word on the PPE front is a bit better. Schuler says the state has secured enough surgical masks, for example, that it can fulfill requests from counties asking for them.
Toni Lodge from Spokane’s Native Project secures her supplies from other sources, including the Indian Health Service. She’s as frustrated as Schuler.
“Trying very hard to get testing apparatus, rapid testing machines. They’re not available to us," Lodge said. "In the Indian health care system, the tribes will get them first, then the self governance clinics, then the urban clinics will get them last. We think we might get testing by November.”
And yet, she says, urban clinics like hers see the majority of Native patients.
As for PPE, she says the Native Project has procured enough masks to provide for its patients, though not enough for its medical staff.