I'm not sure I understand this argument. Are you speaking of sick people coming into the hospital during this pandemic or overall? Because I can ensure you, many hospitalizations are not due to a lack of PPE. Broken hips are not caused by a lack of PPE; myocardial infractions are not caused by a lack of wearing gloves; nor is a person falling into a diabetic comma caused by not wearing PPE.
But, if you're talking about during this pandemic, it was inherently clear that there was a lack of supplies to begin with and panic buying/hoarding would not help the situation. Now don't get me wrong, I am not condoning the actions of any government--I feel as if they did drop the ball--but there was a dire need of any available PPE to be given priority to first responders and frontline healthcare workers. When you're physician gets ill and eventually passes, that PT load is now given to another physician who is putting their life on the life. We need to protect those on the frontlines who are protecting us or else there will be nobody left.
People are making their own masks. There is no shortage of DIY masks. They have always been able to do that but, medical people and government leaders waited months in the USA to tell them to do that. Other countries already proved that wearing masks all the time helped protect you.
Medical people are telling the public not to wear gloves. The reasons they give and examples are detached from reality. There is a video going around on Facebook where a nurse acts like paint accurately represents cross-contamination. No consideration for material properties or other types of gloves.
This. If you change your gloves whenever you would normally wash your hands, then I fail to see why cross-contamination risk would be any higher with gloves.
People were told face masks don't work by the officials. This actively harmful lie was propagated since they wanted to save the PPE for health care workers. The problem with this approach is that one asymptotic/mild cashier can undo the work of a thousand health care workers.
