There is reason to believe that the hospital mask shortage is due in no small part to employee (and patient/family) theft of masks and not necessarily due to dramatically increased need at hospitals (at least not yet).

I say this as a resident physician at an urban hospital in the US. We're now severely low on N95 masks and moderately low on surgical masks but we have only had less than a dozen confirmed covid-19 cases (granted about 100 tested negative cases) so there's no way even 100 additional patients requiring masks suddenly plummeted our stockpiles of masks. Indeed, hospital administration noticed and sent out a mass email imploring employees to return unused masks in personal possession.