It’s extremely surreal to me to suddenly see thousands of police deployed around the country kitted in full protective equipment including gas masks designed to filter out tear gas.
Have those just been sitting in storage the entire time? Is there anything about them that would make them inappropriate for medical use in protecting healthcare workers from COVID? During the extreme nationwide PPE shortage, did any police departments donate their riot equipment to local hospitals to help save lives or were they just locked up in a warehouse somewhere while doctors were going frantic improvising homemade bandanas?
Medical equipment is ordinarily used once and then disposed of, so as not to carry germs from one patient to another. Of course, doctors have been re-using “disposable” masks and wearing garbage bags over their cloths for protection. So maybe the riot gear would have been better. I dunno.
I’d venture police departments tend to keep their “riot gear” up to snuff and, like I had to do when I was in the Army, they likely have to follow a cleaning and maintenance schedule for those protective masks. That schedule should indicate when the filters are changed.
Those type of gas masks usually don’t make any attempt to filter exhaled air. It typically goes out through a one way, rubber valve. It wouldn’t do anything to protect their patients.
In a healthcare setting, the need for N95 masks was mainly to protest the healthcare workers from sick COVID patients. Protecting the patients from the doctors was a distinctly secondary concern. It also would have been relatively trivial to tape over the exhalation port if that was a real concern. Regardless, these masks would have still been more effective than the improvised cloth bandanas that some doctors had to resort to.
My next-door neighbor is a firefighter/EMT. She says that whenever they get a call that could be potential COVID-19, they have to put on “full-turnout” (all protective gear, with masks and oxygen). They don’t have correct medical PPE, so they do the best they can with the equipment they have. It must be terribly uncomfortable for them, and probably not all that effective.