Critical COVID-19 Supplies Ensure a Safe, Healthy Return to School
As students of all ages head back to the classroom for the start of a new school year, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) continues to support safe, in-person learning by distributing 13.5 million COVID-19 test kits and pieces of personal protection equipment (PPE) to California schools.
Within the last month, between Cal OES and our partners at the California Department of Public health, the state shipped 3.5 million pieces of PPE to County Offices of Education to then distribute to schools in their area. These recent PPE shipments are in addition to the more than 10 million COVID-19 test kits distributed by the state.
Earlier this year, Cal OES partnered with the State Department of Education to distribute nearly 21 million masks to County Offices of Education across the state. This was on top of the 1 billion units of PPE sent to counties, schools, medical facilities, and local communities across the state.
The state continues to fulfill orders from local county officials as they are submitted. Offices of Education are able to request COVID-19 resources including masks, respirators, cleaning wipes, and hand sanitizer. An overview of supplies distributed by county is publicly available on the state’s COVID-19 website.
These resources are available because California has built a sustainable, reliable, logistics pipeline that allows us to move from a defensive posture to an offensive one.
Even with this latest distribution, California still maintains a robust supply of hundreds of millions of pieces of PPE and other critical supplies that remain available to be rapidly deployed to communities in need.