I got an e-mail from one of my aunts, with patterns for a homemade mask design, and instructions to print it out for my mother. According to my aunt, hospitals are asking for donations of masks, even homemade ones, to deal with the shortage.
Well, if this is true, then it’s a way for ordinary people to do their part to contribute. Heck, my mom could probably make hundreds a day, without even needing to go buy fabric. But I’m skeptical. Would hospitals really trust supplies of unknown provenance, made to unknown standards? The e-mail she forwarded included a cite, but it’s in German, from I don’t even know where. And on the off chance that it’s true, how does one go about donating them?
Our prison health units where we care for the sick folks, are out of such supplies, and our suppliers are also out. So we’re left to our own devices and have been told by overall management that each different prison health unit manager and staff should try to figure out their own solution while central office tries to figure out a system-wide one.
So yes, we’d take some home made ones. They wouldn’t meet N95 mask standards but ones that were made correctly would be as good as the standard barrier masks previously available at local drug stores.
“The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. How did it come to this?”
Our hospitals said “No thank you”. After a sewing group had started, to great fanfare on the local news, to sew hundreds. Now they say they’re making them for “non-hospital aid workers”…
Mostly what I’ve seen is that they’re making them for patients/visitors to provide some protection from spray and to reserve medical masks for staff. Though considering that in some places the medical staff are being told to wear the same mask all day, clean it with hand sanitizer, or bake it, I don’t know that a cloth mask is that much worse.
My daughter is an RN in a critical care unit of a large Philadelphia hospital. She and other nurses were told on Thursday the hospital had only a four day supply of masks remaining and the nurses should try to bring in scarves.
Yesterday, I dug around in my painting supplies and found two unused N95 masks. Bought a pack of three last year at Home Depot to use while sanding. My wife express mailed them along with a scarf before the post office closed yesterday.
Also at that hospital, COVID-19 tests are carefully rationed. Even when a patient shows symptoms and has a doctor’s order for the test, they’re mostly not given. Also, as of early last week, the test swabs were being sent to the CDC with at least a week’s delay in getting results. Hopefully, PA, like NY and other states, gets a testing program going locally.
Of course members of the 76ers and other important persons got quick tests and results.
The study I saw, a randomized trial done in simpler times, found that cloth masks were essentially worthless. Medical personnel using cloth masks got sick at a significantly and importantly higher rate than those using medical grade masks. The relative risk was 13. That is huge. Subjects were 13 times more likely to get sick using cloth masks than medical ones. The cloth masks were estimated to pass 97% of particles, while medical masks only 44% of particles.
I know there is a tremendous desire to do something. I’ve been running Folding@home, as I may as well use the GPU in this laptop for something. In the grand scheme of things I know it won’t help much at all, but it probably isn’t hurting. I worry about the cloth masks in that they inundate hospitals with trash they have to deal with, or that they give them a false sense of complacency, when they are not in fact protected. That’s just one study. Perhaps it is not representative of the true usefulness of homemade masks.
There is no real mask to no-mask arm in that study.
Also, there is no arm where there is a vacuum clearer paper bag layer inside, as in those my wife is making.
The masks will help reduce problems from hand to face touching that is very hard for a lot of people to suppress (including me).
Remember that masks are more effective breathing out than in. And that heath care-related transmission may a major part of the problem. So it may be better than nothing for hospital workers to wear a homemade mask outside the hospital, such as when doing food shopping, and don’t yet know they are infected, and may be.
Here’s a link on studies done with different DYI mask materials. While vacuum cleaner bags capture more virus than most other materials, they aren’t recommended by experts because they are hard to breathe through.
A two-layer mask such as the kind your wife is making would be even harder to breathe through than a single-layer vacuum bag. If someone is taking a leisurely stroll, breathability may not be as much of an issue as it would be for a nurse on the go. . Anything is better than nothing, though, and of course if people are only using masks to avoid touching their faces, any material would do.
A friend of mine is a ranking nurse at one of the local hospitals, and I just asked her. She says that the homemade ones are nearly worthless, and that her hospital is therefore not accepting them.
Worldwide some of the hospitals ask for masks and medical suits as they are running out of them. It’s better if we could contribute as much as possible f they actually need it
I saw on the news this morning that Prime Time “hospital dramas” (Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Doctor, etc) on hiatus are donating all regulation PPEs to local hospitals and first responders.