This kind of stuff baffles my mind. A little background. I did a bunch of home improvements last year. I bought several n95 masks and other cheaper masks during that time.

I happen to work as a PT and see patients in an outpatient clinic as well as doing home health in ALF, BnC, and pts homes.

When this whole thing hit, my first instinct was to go get the cheap masks in my garage. To my surprise 2 of them were N95 and in open packages that were a tiny bit dusty on the outside. The masks appear clean on the inside.

My plan was to keep seeing my patients but wearing the N95 mask, or at least wear surgical masks until someone requires the N95. This was early on. Sure enough all of the facilities started to require masks even though no one else had them. They couldn’t be bought and employers didn’t have them either. So guess what, I get to work for being slightly more prepared.

The crazy thing is the public shaming of those with proper planning!! Where is the outrage regarding the hospital staff that are purchasers that should have had back up of more than a couple days? Where is the planning and accountability?

It’s nuts to me that a Target in Seattle has a bunch of masks and they are selling them to customers. Later it is found out that they were selling them while the local hospitals were scrambling and didn’t have enough and couldn’t find any? So then Target gets called out and suddenly locate some and end up feeling guilty to the point that they end up “donating” a bunch to the hospitals. Why is this OK? How is target supposed to know which hospitals are low on stock? How are they supposed to know that the hospital staff were so poor at planning? Why weren’t these buyers for the hospitals on the phone and calling every Target, Walmart, Lowe’s, Home Depot, CVS, Walgreens, and other hardware store, paint store, private healthcare supply store within 2 hours of them trying to locate masks?

I agree that some of these large companies should be encouraged to get their supply to hospitals first in a time like this, but I am not sure they knew at the time that the hospitals didn’t have them and I’m also not wiling to not hold the buyers at the hospital accountable. I also don’t think it is fair that Target “donated” all the masks just so they look like they were above it all. It’s nice that they did, but it shouldn’t have been expected. It was a PR move in a society where no one wants to take responsibility.

I did like the approach in LA where someone on Twitter started a thread looking for masks. A bunch of people started looking for them and they ended up snowballing like crazy and got a ton of masks from people that had them. That’s the proper way, ask nicely, don’t force or shame people into it or into doing the job you failed at doing and then want to make them look like they are the bad guy.