It’s been a week since we had our last update on our state’s efforts to acquire Personal Protective Equipment, so I want to provide a quick update on PPE since March 30.

We've only gotten a small fraction of what we need and what we have asked for from the federal government.

If we had relied upon the White House, our state and nearly every state would come up short and could not protect our health care workers and first responders.

Here’s the good news:

We haven’t trusted what we were told by the White House.

Instead, members of my Governor’s Office, @IDPH and @ReadyIllinois have been working tirelessly to pursue all other routes to acquire additional PPE for the fight against COVID-19 in Illinois.

We continue to source and ship as much protective gear as we can from all over the world, bringing it to Illinois by whatever means necessary.

This isn't as simple as placing an order and having it arrive at your doorstep a few days later. 

There's a worldwide shortage that has us racing the clock and battling against other states and the federal government.

But we MUST protect our heroic health care professionals.

Over a 10-day period, health care workers statewide use just under 1.5 million N95 masks, 25 million gloves, 4.4 million gowns and 700,000 surgical masks.

That's before you count McCormick Place, which could bring our surgical mask burn rate to over 2 million in that time.

When you compare our federal shipments to our burn rate, the product we’ve received from the federal stockpile will last only a handful of days in this multi-month battle – it’s our own state procurement initiative that is making the difference.

To anyone who wants a “response” to some of the blame-shifting coming out of the White House, all I have to say is: look at the numbers.