And those people who had no prior understanding of plastics’ role in modern health care got their lesson thanks to COVID-19. The pandemic has taught us this in often drastic ways, as doctors and nurses in North America and Europe ran out of personal protective equipment (PPE)—disposable gloves, masks, shields, hats, gowns, and booties—and as governments outbid each other in order to airlift limited (and highly overpriced) supplies from China, to which the Western producers of PPE, obsessed with cutting costs, had relocated most of their production lines, creating dangerous yet entirely
...more
