In 2019 the world experienced a new virus named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) causing an illness called COVID-19 leading to a pandemic. The severe illness required a significant increase in hospitals and medical supply utilization. This highly contagious virus mandated a strict prevention of transmission among the population, first responders and medical staff with significant increase utilization of personal protective equipment (PPE).  The hospital supplies were limited by the policy of just-in-time inventory, our national and states inventories were diminished by out-of-date supply in addition to a major increase demand caused shortage of PPE and medical supply. Our reliance of foreign made medical equipment, the initial decrease of the world production secondary to the worldwide mitigation efforts and diverting equipment to local health systems in the countries of origin lead to a significant brake of the medical supply chains in the United States of America. This proved to be very harmful to our effort to care for the population and added a significant burden to our healthcare budget. We reviewed the literature and summarized the lessons learned and recommended approaches to prevent similar problems when we face the next pandemic.

Keywords

Pandemic, supply chain, healthcare supply chain, covid-19, CDC, Center for Disease Control, PPE