Last Wednesday, May 12, 2021, one of the Ph.D. students at the Stochastic Geomechanics Laboratory at Texas A&M University (TAMU), Guillermo Duran, participated as a speaker in the “Experiences in the U.S. PPE Market: Lessons and Challenges” seminar, presented by TAMU’s Cross-Border Threat Screening and Supply Chain Defense (CBTS) Center of Excellence, part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence Network.
The seminar began with an introduction by Dr. Matt Cochran, Research Director at CBTS. “[Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)] shortages affected most everybody, either directly or perhaps one person removed, at the height of the pandemic,” he remarked when explaining why issues surrounding PPE were so important to the Chief Medical Officer at DHS. As it became clear that COVID-19’s main pathway of infection is through airborne transmission, the demand for PPE increased, which gave way to shortages as well as to an influx of counterfeit and sub-standard products, all of which endangered the lives of the public at large.
“[The PPE supply chain] system as a whole, for the United States and globally, it didn’t work. When COVID-19 set in, our supply chains were broken,” he punctuated, stressing the importance of adequate respiratory protection.
Dr. Cochran went on to introduce Guillermo Duran’s presentation, which he described as an international perspective necessary to understand the issues concerning the PPE market and domestic supply.
Guillermo, in turn, introduced the “U.S.-Mexico Risk Taskforce to Support the Health Supply Chain Systems for Infrastructure and Workforce Threatened by the COVID-19 Pandemic” Project, codenamed R-13 at CBTS-TAMU, and sponsored by the DHS-Countering of Mass Destruction Weapons office. He provided an overview of its three main objectives: the integration of a triple-helix binational taskforce, the development of a data-lake system concentrating near real-time analytics to provide strategic information about the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a monthly risk bulletin, which includes PPE supply as one of its research problems.
“When analyzing the U.S. consumption trend, we can see that from January 2009 to January 2020 there was a relatively constant trend, but when the pandemic started, there was a sudden increase. May 2020 was the peak of U.S. consumption in terms of U.S. dollars: around $4 billion in value of this consumption of textile facemasks and gas masks,” Guillermo stated. He went on to illustrate the provenance of the PPE supply to the United States, with China providing the largest share, with 73%, followed by Mexico with 9%, and then Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, and Canada, with 2%.
Having elaborated on the Chinese suppliers and their numbers, Guillermo concluded by stating that partners such as Mexico have the potential to help the U.S. meet its demand for face masks and gas masks, which remains significantly higher than in pre-pandemic years, if its own production were to be insufficient in the future.
