Makeshift safety gear being used at hospitals
Workers turn to sport goggles, homemade face shields for protection
One Seattle-area hospital system has set up its own makeshift assembly line — using parts purchased from Home Depot and craft stores — to create protective face shields for workers. Boston nurses are gathering racquetball glasses to use in place of safety goggles. And in New York, a dialysis centre is preparing to use bandanas in place of masks as protection against the novel coronavirus.
Just 11 weeks into a pandemic crisis expected to last months, the nightmare of medicalequipment shortages is no longer theoretical. Health-care workers, already uneasy about their risk of infection amid reports of colleagues getting sick and new data showing even relatively young people may become seriously ill, are frustrated and fearful.
“That has really freaked everybody out,” said Elissa Perkins, an emergency medicine physician at Boston Medical Center.
U.S. President Donald Trump responded to the growing crisis earlier this week by invoking the Defence Production Act to mobilize war-scale manufacturing for critical items, and federal health officials have announced plans to buy 500 million N95 respirators over the next 18 months.
Also, U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence said legislation signed last Wednesday gives manufacturers protection against lawsuits when selling N95 masks to health-care workers, freeing producers such as 3M and Honeywell to sell tens of millions more per month.
But it’s unclear how long it will take to get the equipment to the front lines, and many worry that lives may be lost before such efforts catch up to a virus spreading exponentially across the country.
Few hospitals have experienced a crush of coronavirus patients. But many of the supplies have been used up during routine care over the past few weeks, with no more on the way amid global hoarding and the shutdown of equipment factories in China and elsewhere.
Chief among the concerns is the limited supply of personal protective equipment, especially the fitted face masks known as N95 respirators that are able to filter out extraordinarily small particles such as viruses. Guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) previously called for using N95 masks whenever seeing a patient suspected of having COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. But last week, the agency changed course as it became clear that demand for N95s would outstrip the country’s small supply.
Now, the CDC says that nurses and doctors only need to wear N95s when performing procedures that might cause the patient to cough or otherwise “aerosolize” the virus, sending it into the air in small particles.
But many health-care professionals wonder whether the looser-fitting surgical masks are adequate. Although the CDC and the World Health Organization have said the virus is not airborne, a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week showed that in laboratory conditions where it is aerosolized — similar to what can happen in a hospital when a patient is intubated — the virus may remain infectious in the air for a half hour.
More than 85,000 health-care providers have signed a Change.org petition that urges the Trump administration to do more to get the critical supplies. Recommendations, they wrote, “should not be based on what’s available; availability should be based on what is necessary.”