County trying to unload 3 million face shields that went unused during the pandemic

BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
>Daily Post Staff Writer

Santa Clara County’s public health department is getting rid of 3 million face shields that went unused during the pandemic.

The county will ship over 500 pallets to a commercial waste recycling company that will then donate them to 17 food banks and four organizations serving the homeless, said Dr. Sara Cody, the county’s public health officer.

Santa Clara County is paying $99,060 to Happen Ventures of New Jersey to coordinate the donations, Cody said in a report for the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

The county tried to distribute the excess face shields within California first. Around 32 pallets were shipped from the county warehouse from September through November, but nobody was interested in the rest of the inventory, Cody said.

“The current market is flooded with similar excess product,” she said in her report.

The California Department of Public Health gave the county face shields and other protective equipment during the early phase of the pandemic, Cody said.

The face shields are considered medical and disposable face shields. They have a typical lifespan of two to three years in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment, Cody said.

The face shields can still be used in non-medical settings, Cody said. The Board of Supervisors approved the donation on Tuesday (Jan. 14) without a discussion.

A representative for Cody declined an interview and wouldn’t answer questions about how much the face shields cost, or how the equipment was expired.

“We are unable to provide a count of pallets of face shields used by the county emergency operation during pandemic response,” the health department said in an unsigned email.

Cody went on unpaid leave in September 2023 so she could write a memoir at Stanford about her Covid response.

“I wanted to tell the story of what happened because the pandemic, in large part, was fought county by county, and there’s over 3,000 counties across the United States,” Cody told the Stanford Report. “It was this absurd patchwork, and a local story is an important one to be told.”

Cody returned to her job in June.

San Mateo County fiasco

In San Mateo County, an estimated $7 million of county-purchased personal protective equipment, or PPE, was damaged in the rain at the San Mateo Event Center in October 2021.

Damaged gear included gowns, cleaning supplies and face shields that had been stored outside. The county later downgraded the loss to “several hundred thousand dollars.”

Like Santa Clara County, health officials offered supplies to health care agencies, schools and other states, but only a few things were accepted, County Manager Mike Callagy said at the time.

The supplies were purchased early in the pandemic when there was a scramble for any suitable supplies since it was unknown how long supply shortages would last, Callagy said at the time.