The donations to the Americas are coming from a purchase of 89 million masks by Direct Relief, among the largest single PPE purchases by a charitable nonprofit. The masks, bought from BYD Co., will fill more than one hundred 40-foot shipping containers.

“Direct Relief continues to do everything it can to mobilize private support and respond to the still-urgent need to protect health workers and members of the public as Covid infections rage, particularly in areas of the US that have had limited access and neighboring countries where public funding is overstretched,” said Direct Relief President and CEO Thomas Tighe. “We’re deeply thankful for the public support that has enabled this large-scale infusion of high-quality PPE at this critical time.”

Direct Relief has built strong working relationships across Latin America with national health ministries, multilateral organizations and local health organizations.

In Ecuador, Direct Relief is shipping three containers to the Ministry of Public Health, which has informed Direct Relief of plans to use them in vaccination campaigns in rural areas where vaccine hesitancy is higher than in cities.

“The support of your organization has been enormous for us throughout the pandemic,” said Luis Armijos of the National Directorate of International Cooperation and Relations at Ecuador’s Ministry of Public Health.

In Panama, some of the masks will support vaccination campaigns for students and school staff, according to Fundación Unidos por Panamá, Direct Relief’s in-country partner.

In Mexico, 20 million masks have been allocated to INSABI, which provides health care to about 33 million people who fall outside of the country’s Social Security system.

Funding for the 89 million mask purchase came from private donors, including The Coca-Cola Foundation, the global philanthropic arm of The Coca-Cola Company.

In addition to PPE, Direct Relief is helping transport Covid-19 vaccines to Mexico and other countries throughout the Americas, the most recent delivery of which was a 2.7 million-dose donation from Moderna to the Government of Mexico. In total, Direct Relief has helped ship more than 12 million Covid-19 vaccine doses to the Americas.

Delivering PPE in the US AND Globally

Direct Relief is also reserving 10 million masks for US safety-net health facilities, including Federally Qualified Health Centers and Free and Charitable Clinics.

Another six shipping containers with 5.3 million masks have been allocated to Indonesia. Other shipments are planned for health care providers in Armenia, Fiji, Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank.

Once the latest round of mask deliveries is complete, Direct Relief will have donated nearly 300 million PPE units since the pandemic began.

This includes 228 million protective masks, 93 million of which were donated through CAF-Africa, an initiative supporting community health workers on the frontlines of Africa’s Covid response.

It also includes 950 tons of PPE sent to Brazil – specifically, nearly 9 million Level 1 medical isolation gowns requested by the Brazilian Ministry of Health for facilities nationwide – part of a larger donation of 80 million gowns from McKesson to Direct Relief.

The post Direct Relief Donating 60 Million KN95 Masks for Covid-19 Fight in Latin America and the Caribbean appeared first on Direct Relief.

The shipments contained 8.3 million defined daily doses of medication, including personal protective gear for health providers, typhoid and Hepatitis B vaccines, antibiotics, mental health medications, cancer therapies, insulin, rare disease therapies, and prenatal vitamins.

On Friday, a major Direct Relief shipment of personal protective equipment, including 10,809 boxes of gloves and 66,000 N95 masks, arrived at the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, or IMSS, in an effort to provide PPE for health professionals so they’re protected against Covid-19 as they treat patients.

Friday’s shipment took place with financial support from the Coca-Cola Foundation in México and is the first in a series as omicron cases surge across the country.

United States

Direct Relief delivered 370 shipments weighing 4,795 lbs. and containing 31,245 doses of medications over the past week. Among them were:

• Welvista, South Carolina
• NCMedAssist, North Carolina
• Community Health, Illinois
• St. Vincent de Paul Pharmacy, Texas
• Fort Bend Health Center AccessHealth, Texas
• UNC Health Care, North Carolina
• University Health – Truman Medical Center, Missouri
• University Health – Lakewood Medical Center, Missouri
• The Free Medical Clinic, South Carolina
• Greenville Free Medical Clinic, South Carolina

Worldwide

This week, outside the US, Direct Relief shipped more than 8.2 million defined daily doses of medication totaling 1.5 million lbs.

Countries that received medical aid over the past week included:

• Brazil
• Pakistan
• Tunisia
• Palestinian Territories
• Burundi
• Colombia
• Peru
• India
• Indonesia
• Nepal

In the News

Direct Relief ranked 5th largest charity in the country by Forbes – KEYT

Medical Providers Offer COVID-19 Testing Guidance Amid Overwhelming Demand in Santa Barbara County – Noozhawk

Supporting the Beirut Fire Brigade – Anera

Ebrard Announces Donation of 2.7 Million Moderna Vaccines – La Silla Rota

Moderna to Donate 2.7 Million Covid-19 Vaccines to Mexico: Ebrard – PorEsto!

Here’s Where to Find a Covid-19 Test in Santa Barbara – KEYT

Operational Update: Medical Aid Departed for Haiti, Six Other Countries Over Past Week – ReliefWeb

Year to Date

Since January 1, 2022, Direct Relief has delivered 529 shipments to 363 organizations in 39 US states and territories and 20 countries. These shipments contained 9.3 million defined daily doses of medication valued at $51 million (wholesale) and totaled 1.5 million lbs.

Over the past 12 months, Direct Relief has also supported 479 organizations in 45 countries with $61.1 million in grant funding.

The post PPE Arrives at Hospitals in Mexico, Medical Aid to 37 US States and 10 Countries appeared first on Direct Relief.

The first confirmed case of Covid-19 appeared in Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos, on March 16, roughly three weeks after the first potential cases were identified in the country, brought to the city by an Italian visitor who reported himself almost immediately upon arrival. But by then, the fear that has accompanied the virus around the globe had already established itself. It has yet to dissipate.

In the first weeks after the pandemic reached in the state, demand for tests skyrocketed, said Dr. Daniel Madrid, Morelos’ Director of Coordination and Supervision, the technical branch of the state Secretary of Health, though at the time the prohibitive cost of tests meant administering them statewide would have cost more than five times the secretary’s annual budget. In some state hospitals, said Dr. Madrid, as many as 40% of frontline workers took leave because of pre-existing conditions that made them especially vulnerable to infection. Meanwhile, demand for protective gear outpaced availability. In one state hospital, Dr. Madrid said, a supply of 2,000 PPE kits was used up in a single day.

As the single largest private supplier of donated protective equipment in Mexico, Direct Relief is not only working to protect frontline workers but also to fight panic, a grave danger for treating the virus and stemming its spread. On June 30 alone, Direct Relief delivered more than 10,000 masks, as well as gloves, surgical gowns, face shields and other protective gear, sponsored by the Coca-Cola Foundation, to three hospitals in Morelos, the first step in an ongoing effort to ensure that hospitals throughout Mexico’s under-served provinces remain equipped to combat the current crisis. It’s part of the latest wave of shipments that will distribute up to 1 million masks to more than 150 hospitals across Mexico in response to Covid-19.

Morelos, due in no small part to its proximity to Mexico’s capital city, is particularly vulnerable. According to Dr. Madrid, fully 75% of the state population over the age of 20 is overweight, some 35% have been diagnosed with hypertension, and 15% with diabetes. Only one of the state’s 10 hospitals has a CT scan, which can make diagnosis challenging. Beyond that, the city’s proximity to the capital, the primary focal point for contagion nationwide, leaves the entire state vulnerable to infection. “A significant number of the houses in Cuernavaca are weekend homes of people from the city,” said Dr. Madrid. “So instead of decreasing mobility, the beginning of the quarantine ended up increasing mobility because people from Mexico City came here to ‘self-isolate,’ but really, they came here to go to parties.”

Federal guidelines did not allow for the closing of highways or state borders, though some residents urged the Morelos state government to do just that. Instead, state health institutions had spent the previous months bulking up their capacity to the best of their ability, surveying available hospital beds in state hospitals, and setting up centers to treat Covid-19 patients at state-run hospitals. In the indigenous community of Axochiapan in the state’s southwestern corner, a large group of residents attempted to block the hospital’s opening, even going so far as threatening to burn it down before it could accept any infected patients, said Dr. Madrid. Not long after, that hospital received its first Covid-19 patient, the leader of those protests. He died within a week.

Now, several months into Mexico’s crisis, exhaustion is as critical a problem as fear for healthcare workers and residents alike.

The Mexican Institute of Social Security, or IMSS, a hospital in Cuernavaca, has seen some 1,300 Covid-19 patients since mid-March when the city’s outbreak started, and currently has around 70 patients under supervision on the three floors currently devoted to Coronavirus infections. Relatively few staff members took leave from the hospital – no more than 10%, said hospital director Dr. Delia Gamboa Guerrero.

“Doctors from all of our teams have been helping to deal with Covid-19 patients because if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have the personnel to handle it,” she said. “So the problem now is that people are tired, they’re exhausted.”

Though the IMSS hospital has never surpassed 85% occupancy, said Dr. Gamboa, “the beds aren’t everything: there are medication and tools that sometimes run out, even when you have space.” Among those tools are certified protective gear, increasingly challenging to get as both larger cities, like the neighboring capital, and larger countries, like the United States, consume the necessary equipment in enormous quantities.

Indeed, according to Dr. Madrid, the fact that Mexico’s hospitals have at no point been saturated is largely due to gaps in the country’s medical system. “A patient that, under other circumstances, might survive for a month in another hospital, here, no – their case will complicate more quickly.” High mortality rates, in other words, keep hospital beds empty.

The state’s first IMSS hospital, surrounded by sugarcane fields on the outskirts of Zacatepec, has been especially hard hit, with mortality rates of 50% among Covid-19 patients and some two dozen hospital workers infected (one among them has died, a young assistant nurse who passed away less than a month ago.) At the height of the pandemic in May, said Dr. Marco Antonio Bermudes Espinosa, the hospital’s clinical director, the Covid-19 team would see nine deaths daily. “There was a death and then maybe 20 minutes later another death and 20 minutes after that another,” said Dr. Bermudes. “Some days there were lines of people outside,” said Fabiola Cabrera Santana, the hospital’s head of nurses.

While hospitals in Cuernavaca face the same difficulties as urban hospitals everywhere – namely dense populations and high mobility – in the region surrounding Zacatepec, communication has been the primary struggle. Residents in the neighboring community of Xoxocotla, continued to run their weekly outdoor market and local businesses even as large numbers of people fell ill. Many residents died in their homes or took the bodies of loved ones to an unlicensed crematorium. Others waited too long to seek medical help, said Nurse Cabrera, “and they would die at the entryway; they wouldn’t even make it inside.”

For now, said Dr. Bermudes, the situation appears to be under control. Deaths are intermittent and usually of much older patients, and there are no major holidays on the horizon to spark another outbreak. Still, for doctors here at the IMSS hospital in Zacatepec, the ongoing crisis has become an endurance game, a daily struggle to remain on your feet, to continue treating new cases as panic in the general population fades to anger and frustration as they wait to resume their lives. “We’ve learned a lot,” said Nurse Cabrera in the afternoon that her team received its PPE delivery from Direct Relief. “You learn to channel your fear and your pain and you learn–” she shrugged “–well, you learn to survive.”

– Michael Snyder is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Believer, and The Nation, among others.

– Felipe Luna is an independent photographer, reporter, and editor based in Mexico. His work has been published in Bloomberg, El País, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, among other media outlets.

The post Protective Gear Continues Reaching Hospitals in Mexico as Covid-19 Cases Rise appeared first on Direct Relief.

To address the rising case count, Direct Relief is donating 1 million surgical masks from the U.S. to 155 public health care facilities across Mexico.

The donation adds to the more than 330,000 masks, 10,000 goggles, 40,000 faceshields, 489,000 gloves, and 48,000 gowns and coveralls delivered already by Direct Relief to Mexican hospitals and nonprofits responding to Covid-19.

Not included in this total are 100,000 KN95 masks donated to Mexican NGO Fundacion IMSS by two-time Academy Award-winning film director Alfonso Cuarón, which Direct Relief helped import.

Direct Relief, which has operated as registered national NGO in Mexico since 2014, has supported Mexico’s response to Covid-19 since the pandemic began, coordinating with a range of public agencies and businesses.

The Mexican Social Security Institute, the National Nutrition Institute, the Mexican Consulate in California, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have collected and relayed medical supply needs while several Mexico-based medical manufacturers have committed in-kind donations to Direct Relief of medical resources. PricewaterhouseCoopers has worked to identify additional PPE vendors and helped developed a distribution plan that aligns supply with demand

Along with PPE, Direct Relief received Bepanthen (skin cream) from Bayer to be distributed to frontline health workers experiencing skin irritation from PPE. Johnson & Johnson also contributed nonprescription medications and supplies, and The Coca Cola Foundation supported Direct Relief’s response with a $791,000 grant, which was used to purchase PPE.

Additional reporting contributed by Eduardo Mendoza.

The post Mexico Hits Highest Covid-19 Positive Test Rate As 1 Million Masks Arrive From Direct Relief appeared first on Direct Relief.

As countries in Latin America, Africa and South Asia became the latest hotspots of the Covid-19 pandemic, Direct Relief has accelerated its response in these regions, beginning with shipments of enough Covid-related emergency medicine and medical supplies to treat more than 50,000 intensive-care patients in developing countries around the globe.

Shortly after it began its Covid-19 response in January, Direct Relief began identifying and procuring medicines that would be needed by intensive care units treating Covid-19 patients. Working with critical care specialists and healthcare companies, Direct Relief developed ICU Critical Supply Modules that could be prepackaged, stockpiled and rapidly deployed in the event of drug scarcity. The international version of the ICU Modules contains medications and supplies selected to treat up to 500 ICU patients.

Direct Relief has begun dispatching 115 ICU Modules to 32 partners in 27 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeastern Europe. They are being sent with stocks of personal protective equipment and oxygen concentrators, and some partners have requested and are receiving donated ventilators.

Direct Relief’s largest international shipment to date of Covid-19 relief supplies arrived in Ecuador on June 4. Responding to a request from the Government of Ecuador, Direct Relief shipped seven ICU Critical Supply Modules and 90 portable oxygen concentrators, plus basic supplies and medicines for both Covid-19 and general medical care. In all, it shipped 26 pallets of essential medicines and supplies weighing 8.8 tons.

Direct Relief has also so far delivered 164 domestic ICU Modules to hospitals in the United States, each containing supplies designed to treat up to 100 hospitalized patients. Hospitals treating severely ill ICU patients—including those on ventilators—need medication for sedation and to address some of the secondary complications that may arise, including bacterial pneumonia and septic shock. The ICU Critical Supply Modules include antibiotics such as azithromycin and ceftriaxone, vasopressors such as norepinephrine, and respiratory medications like albuterol inhalers.

How Recipients Were Selected

Because the needs of Direct Relief’s partner network far exceed the available resources, Direct Relief carefully selected recipients based on a series of criteria including Covid-19 patient numbers, ICU capacity, status of the proposed recipient hospital as a nationally recognized center of Covid-19 treatment, logistical ability to clear customs and receive the shipments, and direct requests from national Ministries of Health.

The information was cross-checked with national vulnerability data based on Direct Relief’s new Covid-19 International Vulnerability Index Map. The index assigns vulnerability scores to countries based on indicators including co-morbidities, number of hospital beds, population over 60, food insecurity and Covid-19 case counts.

In South America, ICU Module recipients include Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru. In the Caribbean and Central America, ICU Modules are being sent to Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica and St. Lucia. In EMEA, recipients include Armenia, Ghana, Italy, Kosovo, Lesotho, Liberia, Macedonia, Malawi, Palestine, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Yemen and Zimbabwe. In Asia, Dhulikhel Hospital in Nepal is receiving two ICU Modules.

The ICU Modules are only one part of Direct Relief’s Covid-19 response outside the U.S. Direct Relief has provided grant funding to treat Covid-19 among Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, to help build dedicated Covid-19 isolation and treatment wards in Haiti and the Philippines, to purchase PPE in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and India, and—via a $50,000 emergency grant to the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States—to increase Covid-19 testing capacity in Saint Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda. The organization has also provided ventilators and other critical medical items to several countries.

Latin America Response

Direct Relief has a key strategic partnership with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the division of the World Health Organization overseeing 35 countries in the Americas. Direct Relief has arranged a charter flight carrying $7 million in PPE purchased by PAHO to be delivered to many of its member states across the Americas. The charter is currently scheduled to arrive in Panama this week.

Supported in part by generous financial and material donations from Coca-Cola Foundation, Bayer Mexico, Johnson & Johnson, 3M and AstraZeneca, Direct Relief donations to Mexican health partners include 350,000 surgical masks for hospitals, 10,000 goggles and 30,000 face shields.

Another large shipment containing PPE, Emergency Medical Backpacks, general medicines and other supplies was delivered to the Ministry of Health of Bolivia, which is facing multiple health emergencies including Covid-19 and a dengue outbreak. Additional Covid-19 preparedness donations containing Emergency Medical Backpacks and PPE have been sent to PAHO member states including Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and Paraguay.

Since Direct Relief’s first Covid-19 response shipment on Jan. 24, 2020, the organization has sent $23 million in medical aid to South America via 26 deliveries. Internationally excluding the United States, Direct Relief has distributed 1.4 million masks, 1.3 million gloves and more than 500,000 other PPE supplies.

The post Direct Relief Expands Medical Aid to More Than Two Dozen Countries Fighting Covid-19 appeared first on Direct Relief.