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By Melanie Evans and Drew Hinshaw 

Hospitals and public-health officials in the U.S. and Europe are rationing medical masks and scrounging for more, as they prepare for a potential widening of the coronavirus epidemic.

Global hoarding has left European wholesalers with empty shelves. Manufacturers outside China say they won't be able to fill an exploding stack of orders for months. U.S. hospitals and medical-supply companies have reported dwindling mask inventory and partial or delayed shipments as the surge in global demand for protective equipment enters a second month.

While many people in China have taken to wearing masks in public, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its European counterparts are trying to reserve masks for health-care workers and patients. The CDC has urged the public not to use masks unless told to do so by a doctor.

Masks known as N95 respirators guard against the virus, but only if used properly. Other masks don't filter out small particles harboring the bug.

The U.S. has a stockpile of 12 million N95 masks, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. The U.S. would need 300 million N95 masks to respond to an emergency, he said.

A Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman said today the agency has received reports of spot shortages and urged hospitals to report concerns to the agency.

In New York, officials have begun drawing from government stockpiles to fill requests from hospitals and nursing homes for thousands of respirator masks, more than one million surgical masks and 18,000 face shields in the past month, said Stephanie Buhle, a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

NYU Langone Health, which includes about 360 outpatient centers and four hospitals around New York, has removed all but an emergency supply of respirator masks from many locations to create a stockpile in case of a U.S. outbreak.

"We would love if there would be cavalry on the other side of the hill. We have to expect they are not going to come," said Dr. Michael Phillips, NYU Langone Health's chief epidemiologist

The stockouts are a reckoning for the West, which for decades has outsourced the manufacture of goods including medical supplies to China.

Manufacturers say much of the world's protective-medical gear is made in Hubei, the quarantined province where the virus first emerged late last year. Hubei is a global hub for producing masks, bandages, surgical drapes and gowns, said a spokesman for Medline Industries Inc., a Northfield, Ill., medical-supply manufacturer and distributor.

In Europe, where more than 500 cases emerged this week, chiefly in Italy, officials have told health-care workers to be prepared to reuse disposable face masks because the supply from China has been cut off.

"It is expected that there will be no deliveries to Europe as long as the crisis persists," the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's equivalent to the CDC, said last week.

As coronavirus spread through China weeks ago, the Vatican sent hundreds of thousands of masks to alleviate a shortage there. Now officials at Rome's Gemelli Hospital, where popes normally go for medical treatment, say they are worried about where to find masks after their current stock runs out in two months.

"There has been panic and a run on supplies," said Giovanni Paolo D'Incecco Bayard de Volo, Gemelli Hospital's head of procurement.

Masks are part of a wider shortage of basic goods that health-care workers need to combat a virus that has sickened 82,585 and killed 2,814. The European Medicines Agency said it is worried about a global medicine shortage, because many active pharmaceutical ingredients, the basic inputs for drugs, are produced in China. Italy's main pharmaceutical lobby this week said it was giving drugstores a recipe to produce their own hand sanitizer.

"Masks are just the beginning of the crisis," said Darius Sawicki, owner of Poland-based wholesaler Medyk eRKa. His suppliers have run out of several health-care products, including hand sanitizer. "There is nothing we can order, because their warehouses are empty," he said.

Officials in China have told companies making masks there to divert their output to the fight against the domestic outbreak, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. India, Taiwan and South Korea -- which is now grappling with its own outbreak of the virus -- have banned the export of masks made in those places.

Some mask makers that have ramped up production outside China say they remain reliant on raw materials produced there.

"In the next month or so, we're going to run out of components," said Ronald Reuben, chief executive of Medicom Group, in Montreal, which has raised production at factories in France and Augusta, Ga. "Europe will not be able to supply its own market."

Premier Inc., which contracts for supplies on behalf of about 2,400 U.S. hospitals, said one of its distributors recently halted shipments of private-label masks manufactured in China. All distributors surveyed recently by Premier said they had delivered less than half of the medical respirators that hospitals had ordered in the past 45 days.

U.S-based mask-makers 3M Co. and Prestige Ameritech have roughly doubled their U.S. production since the outbreak began, to one million masks a week, according to Premier.

3M said it had ramped up production in the U.S., Asia, Europe and Latin America but declined to say how many masks it was producing.

Prestige Ameritech Chief Executive Mike Bowen said he has shared production data with Premier. He said he wants federal officials in the future to urge U.S. hospitals to buy critical medical supplies domestically to avoid shortage risks from a global supply chain.

Manufacturers in the U.S. must report the location of plants to the FDA, but other information about medical-supply production is confidential. Hospitals often don't know where their masks were made, which some executives said makes it difficult to predict how they might be hit by production disruptions.

"This health crisis is highlighting the fact that the industry lacks visibility into manufacturing-site details across the board," said David Gillan, an executive with Vizient Inc., another medical-supply contractor.

--Francis X. Rocca and Natalia Ojewska contributed to this article.

Write to Melanie Evans at Melanie.Evans@wsj.com and Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 27, 2020 14:03 ET (19:03 GMT)

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