Doctors warn of insufficient protective gear after 18 medical staff catch virus

Doctors complain that they have insufficient protective equipment for treating patients with the deadly coronavirus, after 18 medical professionals contract the disease.

“For days we have been warning of oversights, of protocols and instructions for checks that do not fit with the situation — all of these are leading to infiltrations, ticking time bombs in the wards, where [patients] are being received by teams lacking protective equipment, who are becoming infected and infecting others,” Dr. Rey Biton, of the medical residents organization Mirsham, writes on Facebook.

Of the more than 200 Israelis to have contracted the coronavirus, 18 are medical professionals, most of whom are suspected to have become infected by their patients.

A senior official in the Health Ministry rails against his organization for having failed to ensure a sufficient supply of protective equipment — masks, gloves and hazmat suits — for such an outbreak.

“It is confounding what the Health Ministry has been doing in recent years. If it hasn’t been preparing for things like this — what has it been doing?” he tells the Walla news site, on condition of anonymity.