
It’s no secret that US hospitals are facing a dire shortage of personal protection equipment for their workers. The surgeon general even urged the public to stop buying masks, stating, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk.†Aside from insulting our collective intelligence — masks definitely can’t offer foolproof protection, but isn’t it enough that they can help? — the statement potentially fuelled distrust and encouraged further hoarding.
We need to take the opposite approach: Emphasize how important masks can be in preventing the spread of disease if widely worn by anybody who is sick or might be. They’re so important, in fact, that we should do whatever we can to get a mask over every face during a pandemic characterised by stealthy spread from people who don’t know they’re infected. Even if it means making them ourselves.
There’s a growing movement to fabricate personal protective equipment at home. In some hospitals, desperate medical workers are fashioning protective face shields out of clear vinyl sheets and office supplies. In other parts of the country, seamstress groups have been hard at work turning T-shirts and bedsheets into face masks for healthcare professionals. My local cottage industry in the San Francisco Bay Area has been so industrious that participants are now distributing masks to grocery store workers, restaurant staff and retirement homes.
It’s sensible to discourage public mask consumption at a time when supply chains are disrupted. But if individuals are mobilised to provide masks for their own communities, the shortage will become more manageable.
At the more technical end, Massachusetts General Hospital has called on individuals with 3D printers to help fabricate N95 respirators, a type of mask that blocks the inhalation of viruses. As of last week, two prototypes had already passed an initial fit test. That doesn’t mean makerspaces will soon
be filling the nation’s mask shortage.
As hardware hacker Naomi Wu points out, N95 respirators won’t work unless they are airtight on the face, something that’s hard to achieve with the rigid plastic commonly used in 3D printers (the Massachusetts General prototypes use weather stripping). An improper seal could result in contaminants leaking through the edges of the mask.
Last week, I took to Twitter in an attempt to source some N95 respirators for the hospital where my brother works.
—Bloomberg
Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney