Homemade masks are big hit — just not with hospitals

Driven by a massive gap in protective equipment for health care workers — and the desire to do something, anything, to help fight the spreading coronavirus while stuck at home — hundreds of civicminded sewers across the Bay Area and the country are coming together over a simple, if anachronistic, fix: homemade masks.

As news of the nationwide mask and equipment shortage bounced around the internet, Facebook groups like “Coronavirus Mask Makers” quickly ballooned to about 1,600 members. They trade sewing patterns, contact lists and how-to videos, likening their efforts to the at-home manufacturing of ammunition and supplies during World War II.

Hobby quilter and aesthetician Christine Hmelar, 60, of Palo Alto had a little trouble finding a pattern at first. But she quickly found “tons of YouTube tutorials” to help her churn out double-layered cotton masks that she has given to a nurse at Kaiser in San Jose.

Hmelar uses a sewing machine to produce the masks, which take about 15 minutes each to make — after about 12 hours of cutting fabric, which she said is the tightest weave she could find. She even sourced elastic on Ebay when local stores came up short.

With her salon closed until further notice under shelterin-place orders, Hmelar said it feels good to stay busy and contribute to the cause.

“It gives me something to do for the community and medical personnel,” Hmelar said.

As well-intentioned as the efforts may be, local hospital systems, including Sutter Health and Stanford Health Care, have said they won’t accept cloth masks as donations because they do not meet the medical standards for personal protective equipment.

The problem comes down to cloth masks’ inability to filter out viral particles the way manufactured masks are designed to do, said Amanda Chawla, vice president of supply chain for Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children’s Health.

An oft-cited 2015 study found that cloth masks led to statistically significant rates of infection compared with medical masks across 14 hospitals, with penetration of cloth masks by particles reaching almost 97% compared with 44%

for medical masks.

Using homemade masks, Chawla said, “would be an absolute, absolute last resort. Beyond a disaster.”

But that doomsday scenario — until recently, unimaginable to many in the medical field — no longer seems like such an impossibility to some. In California, hospitals are churning through supplies and are expected to need hundreds of millions of masks and other protective gear as the coronavirus pandemic fills emergency rooms and intensive care units.

In its guidance to hospitals regarding expected face mask shortages, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says health care workers “might use homemade masks (e.g., bandana, scarf) for care of patients with COVID-19 as a last resort.”

Some hospitals, including Kaiser Permanente, have said they will now accept cloth masks made via specific instructions, for use as an extra layer over N95 masks or during a severe shortage. Other facilities, including Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, refer to the DIY masks as “covers” to indicate that they’ll be used in combination with other medical-grade protective equipment, such as face shields.

After initially saying it did not want homemade masks, Kaiser reversed course last week, saying it would take the donations, though workers would inspect all masks before accepting them.

“Our focus is on working with our supply chain vendors and manufactures to provide our staff with medical-grade protective equipment,” Kaiser spokeswoman Kerri Leedy said, saying would-be donors should first consult Kaiser’s list of needed medical equipment, including N95 respirators and surgical masks, to see if they had any medically sound equipment to give before trying to make their own.

Michelle Gutierrez Vo, a nurse at a Kaiser facility in Fremont who is on the

board of directors for the California Nurses Association, bristled at the idea that health care workers could end up relying on cloth masks in a clinical setting.

“That’s just not OK,” Gutierrez Vo said. “The CDC should not have watered that down based off the availability of equipment instead of science.”

While local sewers acknowledge those concerns — many online groups post disclaimers that homemade masks are meant to supplement manufactured masks, or to be used by people not working directly with patients — they also have risen to the “worst-case scenario” occasion.

So widespread is the mask-making movement that Eddie’s Quilting Bee in Sunnyvale is selling maskmaking kits, while the national retailer JoAnn Fabrics has launched its own tutorial site.

Santa Clara resident and stay-at-home mom Christine Kacirek, 39, first heard about the shortage from her sister, a nurse in Portland, Oregon. On Saturday, after scouring pages with “too many conflicting opinions” among sewers, she started her own Facebook group, “Bay Area Homemade Medical Masks.”

More than 60 people have since joined, prompting Kacirek to film a stepby-step video of herself churning out her first batch of masks. Those went to a neighbor, a Kaiser cardiologist who was so sincerely grateful, Kacirek said, it made her feel “awful.”

By Tuesday, she was producing batches of 12 masks each for friends of friends and hospitals listed on a widely circulated Google doc. What really motivates her, she said, is the thought of her sister working without a mask.

“I’m angry for her, for all my other friends in the medical staff serving the community, taking care of us,” Kacirek said. “I don’t know what systems failed to get us here.”

She plans to crank out more batches. Every day, she hears from health care workers looking for masks through the internet grapevine. “Are they adequate? Absolutely not. But they’re at least helpful,” Kacirek said. “That convinced me.”