covid_stassi

You would think so, but with enough lawyers, I think the hospital could claim it just didn't know what the risks were (does anyone, really) and made a good faith effort to protect the staff. Honestly I feel for the administrators too. I'm sure they don't relish choosing between a bunch of terrible options. The real beef I have is with the federal government. This attitude towards the states of 'you should be trying to get this stuff yourselves' is ridiculous. In the face of scarce resources there is only prioritization of the resources and working to increase overall capacity. Letting the states get in bidding wars ensures masks go to the richest states, not the states where the need is greatest.

I think officially it is that they don't know what the employees are bringing from home. They could be bringing some knockoff mask that offers very little protection. But come on, you can't use a mask with 3M stamped on it that you bought at Home Depot?

I'll also speculate that it could create friction between staff - How come you get protect and I don't? It could be a problem.

Anonymous new profile, my apologies. My partner wasn't comfortable with me saying this stuff in a public way. They work in the emergency department of a hospital in North America.

It's not just that they'll be fired if they speak out...

The hospitals are also threatening to withhold worker's compensation payouts if a staff member is caught using anything brought from home, even if it's real, name brand equipment. Got some N95s leftover from that home improvement project? Leave them at home and use this surgical mask instead (still better than nothing, to be fair). They are asking staff members to inform on other staff. To be clear: these policies were in effect for an area with coughing COVID patients. They do put surgical masks on the patients, which is very helpful, but I'm livid that they then ask the nurses to NOT use N95s in this scenario.

They are also undertaking dubious re-use and cleaning procedures that are not scientifically proven. For example, masks (both surgical and N95s, which are only for workers doing things like intubation) are being used for an entire day (also not correct usage) and then placed in paper folders for a week. At the end of the week, the masks are deemed 'clean' and reused by the same staff member. Kind of like a mask for each day of the week. There is not strong scientific evidence this is an effective or safe procedure. These procedures might work, but there isn't testing proving that fact.

I understand hospitals are in a bind here. There are simply not enough masks available (both surgical and N95) in the world. If the hospitals admit their ad-hoc procedures are ineffective they risk short term mutiny in their staff ranks. They also risk long term litigation by admitting they can't protect staff. Unfortunately their approach of 'clamp down hard on dissent' is preventing the real message from being broadcast loudly enough: It should be blindingly clear we need a crash program to ramp domestic PPE manufacturing by an order of magnitude (or two).

As an aside, please call your senators and representatives and ask them to force the Trump administration to use the DPA to bring more PPE capacity online. It's really too late now, but better late than never. We'll need to establish permanent manufacturing capacity for this anyways so we never get caught out like again.