LACKAWANNA COUNTY, Pa. — Allyson Favuzza barely has enough N95 masks for herself and her staff, who deal with positive COVID patients every day at Hometown Health Care in Covington Township.
"What happened was when Biden announced that he was going to provide all these masks free, these companies that manufacture the masks have federal contracts, so all of the masks that we were buying, they're not selling them to us anymore because they're going to give them to the federal government," Favuzza explained.
The government is then shipping them to pharmacies that participated in the federal vaccine program. Favuzza and her team got the shots from the state, so they're left out of the N95 distribution.
But customers don't know that.
"We have a lot of people reaching out to us. We are one of the biggest vaccinators in the community. So naturally, people thought, you know if we're providing the COVID-19 vaccine, we should be providing these federally funded masks as well," said Favuzza.
Tom DePietro received a shipment of the free masks at DePietro's Pharmacy in Dunmore. All 700 of them were gone within eight hours.
"It's surprising to see the demand for masks at this point. You know, we've been at this for about two years now. So, many people have had their fair share of masks," DePietro said.
Now that he's all out, he has no idea if, or when, more free N95s are on the way.
"We're not given information. When the masks landed on Wednesday, they came unannounced. The quantity that came was unannounced. So, you know, we're as eager as the community is to have more to be able to distribute."
Favuzza predicts by the time she has access to them, it'll likely be too late, the same thing that happened with the free at-home testing kits.
"The week after Christmas, the first week of January, you couldn't get a test anywhere. Now they're more freely available, but COVID is much more ... our cases have dropped. So again, kind of missed the boat. The need is not there. So, are we going to get masks in a couple months when the COVID cases are low? Possibly."
She says it would be helpful to have access to the N95s outside the more urban areas of the county.
"We are in Lackawanna County, but we're somewhat rural. We're removed a little bit from Scranton, and I think that for us, if we have masks, we maybe can reach a larger population."
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