The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for California to create a stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) for essential workers. This would be a financially prudent form of insurance, potentially saving the state money by avoiding high-priced emergency PPE contracts. Maintaining the stockpile would be cheaper than real-time purchases even if it was not needed for another 35 years. The potential savings from averting high-priced emergency PPE contracts dwarf the budgetary cost of creating a PPE stockpile at normal non-pandemic prices. Healthcare access was severely affected in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 251,100 California healthcare workers receiving unemployment benefits, in part due to lack of adequate PPE.
