When a friend called Tom Banning saying he'd managed to get 525,000 surgical masks from a factory in Mexico, Banning knew just what to do. Over 72 hours this week, he helped get the masks to nearly every corner of Texas.
Tom Banning was fielding increasingly anxious pleas from doctors across Texas when he got a call from a golfing buddy with an unusual offer.
Boxes of surgical masks fill the back of a rental truck in Austin, Texas. The masks, from a factory in Mexico, were driven over the border and distributed to Texas medical offices.“We joked that we felt like drug runners, except we weren’t making a dime,” said John Henderson, chief executive of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, who worked with Banning to distribute the masks.
That’s fueling increasing desperation in emergency rooms, ambulances and physicians’ offices, where front-line medical workers are being forced to reuse masks, gowns and other equipment and guard them like illicit drugs. One rural hospital in the state reported that three nurses, including one who was pregnant, walked out in frustration over the lack of protective equipment, Henderson said.
The shipment of masks got held up at the border over the weekend when the U.S. and Mexico agreed to halt nonessential travel between the two countries. It got across Monday, only to be held up again Monday night by a nighttime curfew in the Rio Grande Valley.Val Stark, whose firm provides supplies for medical practices across Texas, drove to Austin to pick up masks for physicians in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Rural hospitals across the state sent drivers to get masks. One hospital administrator from Hereford — a small community 500 miles away in cattle country near Amarillo — personally flew down in a small plane.
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