Focus: Infection Control

A million N95 masks is not what it used to be

In normal, pre-Covid-19 times, that would be a large supply. Now, not so much.


On April 2, a plane left China with 1.2 million N95 masks. In normal, pre-covid-19 times, that would be a big stash, according to an article on The Washington Post website.

Most hospitals bought  a few thousand N95s per year. But when the number of covid-19 patients exploded, a million masks  wasn’t that many. Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Robert Kadlec said in February that the U.S. would need 3.5 billion N95s in a serious pandemic.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the median hospital stay of a surviving Covid-19 patient is 10 to 13 days. That works out to between 350 and 520 N95s per patient.

In mid-May, as emergency supply lines increased and reuse of hospital garb has become common, the answer is somewhere in between, according to the article.

Read the article.

 

 



May 28, 2020


Topic Area: Infection Control


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