A journalist wears a mask as President Trump and members of the coronavirus task force brief reporters at the White House on Monday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The Washington Post
April 15, 2020
By: Carol D. Leonnig, Elizabeth Dwoskin and John Hudson 

In mid-March, a National Security Council team rushed to fix what they saw as a threat to the U.S. government’s ability to function amid the advancing pandemic: a lack of masks to protect enough staff on the White House complex.

Alarmed by the small cache and the growing signs of an acute shortage of protective gear in the United States, a senior NSC official turned to a foreign government for help, according to people familiar with the situation.

The outreach resulted in a donation of hundreds of thousands of surgical masks from Taiwan, which had plentiful domestic production and had sharply curtailed the spread of the coronavirus on the island.

While the bulk of Taiwan’s goodwill shipment went to the Strategic National Stockpile, 3,600 were set aside for White House staff and officials, administration officials said.    [FULL  STORY]