Kickstart: A hospital POV on PPE

We've written a lot at Plastics News about companies pivoting to make personal protective equipment. How about a story from the flip side? Our sister paper Crain's Detroit Business has this item from hospitals stocking up, but still uncertain if the U.S. supply chain can keep up with the expected increase in COVID-19 cases.

Beaumont Health, a hospital system based in Southfield, Mich., is working to have a 90-day supply of PPE on hand if the second wave results in the same number of patients in the fall as the spring — 1,200 patients at the peak in April.

"We have been preparing for a second surge now for four months and learned a lot as we climbed the hill and then came down the backside of the curve," said Melanie Fisher, Beaumont's supply chain director. "We've spent the last few months building up our inventory [of PPE] days on hand."

But as the chief financial officer of Grand Blanc-based McLaren Health noted, it's expensive to rent warehouse space. In addition, PPE is still selling for higher costs than pre-coronavirus levels.

Early during the pandemic and the industry's response to it, PN ran a story about a plastics supplier that shifted to making medical equipment. When the company went to its workers for volunteers to come in for the project, staff quickly signed on.

"Does this mean we get to be the good guys?" was all one worker asked.

Similar attitudes spun across the industry. Consider this from Erin Sloan's story on how packaging companies pulled double duty, responding to increased demand from shoppers stocking up at the grocery store, and new requests to supply PPE.

Doug Borgsdorf, business director for Primex Plastics Corp., best known for making returnable packaging for the auto industry, said his 16-year-old son came downstairs on a Sunday evening.

"Dad, you have to make face shields," Borgsdorf's son Andrew told him. "Turn on the news; they need face shields."

Together they figured out how the company could supply its local hospital within days.

I got my first pair of glasses when I was 7 years old, a pair of blue cat eye frames. Plastic frames weren't all that stylish, especially the tortoiseshell ones I had when I entered middle school. So in eighth grade, when I was allowed to get a pair of wire-frame glasses, I was very happy.

The optician (and my mother) warned me to be very careful with them, though, because the lenses required by the frames would be very easy to scratch. Two weeks later, I proved them right.

If only George Galic's scratch-resistant coating for polycarbonate lenses had been available to me then. I wouldn't have had to go through the rest of the school year looking through a scratch.

Galic died earlier this year. He helped develop the silicone-based hard coating for PC while working at Dow Corning Corp., which helped PC find more uses in a range of end markets in addition to eyeglasses.