Healthcare workers say they are at greater risk of the coronavirus because of a switch to less safe face masks
Federal officials have begun urging healthcare workers to switch from respirator face masks to looser surgical ones, a move that is raising alarms among doctors and nurses who say they will now be less protected when treating highly infectious coronavirus patients.
Before this week, U.S. health officials had recommended that doctors and nurses treating suspected or confirmed coronavirus patients wear N95 masks, called respirators, which are designed to filter out about 95% of small airborne particles. But officials are now limiting their use to stretch a national stockpile that contains only about 1% of the masks that experts predict could be needed.
Yet demands for more protective gear have increased as U.S. medical providers have watched in horror as Italian doctors and nurses struggle to treat the huge numbers of sick patients there. According to, 20% of Italian healthcare professionals working on the front lines of the outbreak have become infected with COVID-19.
In emergency rooms, “patients were grabbing them by the boxful,” one said. “I’m searching the whole hospital for my size, but they’re all locked up now. They’re like gold.”As schools close and businesses tell their employees to stay home, healthcare staff still show up to work, and will perhaps even take on extra shifts as case numbers begin to rise.
Still, an L.A. county doctor said the use of surgical masks is a first. “They’re telling us, ‘You’re fine, you’re safe, just use the surgical mask.’ But we never would have done that in the past,” said the doctor who was not authorized to speak to the media. “We all know it’s because we don’t have enough N95 masks, but we can’t come out and say that, because the nursing unions might strike and refuse to come to work.
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