Where are the ventilators? Where are the gowns? Where's the PPEs? Where are the masks? Where are they?

Crucial medical supplies needed to fight the coronavirus are running dangerously low in hospitals.

Vice President Mike Penn says the government has ordered hundreds

do not have enough of those n95 masks and two-thirds of the health workers

polled.

Our health care professionals are still having to reuse masks inside local hospitals.

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the vulnerabilities of America's medical supply chain.

Perhaps one of the most challenging and dire of which

is a country's startling shortage of personal protective equipment,

especially for health care workers.

We were seeing reports of nurses wearing garbage bags

and this advice to make your own mask and we knew that doctors and nurses didn't

have what they need but we didn't know why.

That's Associated Press reporter Juliet Linderman.

For the past seven months she's been working with her colleague Martha Mendoza

and journalists from the Global Reporting Center on a new frontline film,

America's Medical Supply Crisis, an investigation on how we ended up with such shortages,

the deadly consequences, and who's accountable.

I'm Raney Aronson, executive producer of Frontline, and this is the Frontline Dispatch.

The Frontline Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation, committed to excellence in journalism, and by the WGBH Catalyst Fund.

The Front Line Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation committed to excellence

in journalism and by the Frontline Journalism Fund with major support from John and Joanne

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