See, I don't understand this about the Turkish PPE being no good. Because for weeks my facebook has been chock full of people at home making gowns, facemasks, scrubs, scrub bags, and facemask ear relief thingys, all out of bedsheets and pillowcases and old clothes or even knitted in some cases. Visors too although they tend to be 3D printed and then acetate sheets attached. Then there's been various pictures of the nurses, in NHS hospitals not random private care homes, wearing it. One in particular that I can't find now where the nurses were all decked out in stuff made from Bob The Builder duvet covers or something. There are so many posts and groups about it and people doing it, that the hospitals and care homes must be utterly inundated with the stuff by now. This isn't to criticise the individuals giving up their time and materials to make it, just wondering why it's so necessary.
So what exactly is so bad about the Turkish PPE, that makes it "completely unusable" while all the cobbled together stuff from random people at home is apparently acceptable? Doesn't make sense. There seem to be a lot of half truths and weird (political? power?) games afoot inside the NHS and government.
And even if the Turkish PPE gowns are bad enough that the NHS can't use them, why leave them sitting in a Heathrow warehouse, why not either send them back to Turkey and get a refund, or donate them to private care homes where they can be used by cleaners or visitors so not quite front line requirements, or even local councils for their cleaners or something?
And then there's the question of why the hospitals suddenly need so much PPE anyway. Yep I get that the front line does and that they're having to change it far more often. But as anyone waiting for non-Covid treatment from the NHS knows, the whole organisation has more or less thrown its hands in the air and given up on everything other than Covid, nearly all stopped for weeks now. So is there not masses of gloves and facemasks sitting in all the other departments like Podiatry that are all now closed down, that they could take?
Finally baffling, a lot of the PPE isn't hard to make (the fact that random collectives of people are doing it at home proves that). So as well as building (and then mothballing) nightingale hospitals, why hasn't the government similarly thrown together some PPE production lines. We had companies clamouring to build complicated ventilators at the start of this until the hospitals worked out they weren't needed after all. Setting up a conference centre full of people stitching together the right sort of material to make face masks and scrubs ought to be a piece of cake in comparison. They've had weeks to get something going. As its patently obvious that we can't rely on sourcing PPE from other countries now, we should already be six weeks into setting up all sorts of in-country PPE factories by now.
So much of this doesn't make sense.