Why are we just now hearing about this?
I’m stunned. It turns out that health care workers should have been given a different, low cost, durable mask instead of the N-95s but it just never happened:
In the early 1990s, long before P.P.E., N95 and asymptomatic transmission became household terms, federal health officials issued guidelines for how medical workers should protect themselves from tuberculosis during a resurgence of the highly infectious respiratory disease.
Their recommendation, elastomeric respirators, an industrial-grade face mask familiar to car painters and construction workers, would in the decades that followed become the gold standard for infection-control specialists focused on the dangers of airborne pathogens.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promoted them during the SARS outbreak of 2003 and the swine flu pandemic of 2009. A few studies since then have suggested that reusable elastomeric respirators should be essential gear for frontline medical workers during a respiratory pandemic, which experts predicted would quickly deplete supplies of N95s, the disposable filtration masks largely made in China.
But when the coronavirus swept the globe and China cut off exports of N95s, elastomeric respirators were nowhere to be found in a vast majority of hospitals and health clinics in the United States. Although impossible to know for sure, some experts believe the dire mask shortage early on contributed to the wave of infections that killed more than 3,600 health workers.
The pandemic has generated a bevy of painful lessons about the importance of preparing for public health emergencies. From the Trump administration’s tepid early response to the C.D.C.’s bungled coronavirus testing rollout and its mixed messaging on masking, quarantining and the reopening of schools, the federal government has been roundly criticized for mishandling a health crisis that has left one million Americans dead and dented public faith in a once-hallowed institution.
Three years into the pandemic, elastomeric respirators remain a rarity at American health care facilities. The C.D.C. has done little to promote the masks, and all but a handful of the dozen or so domestic companies that rushed to manufacture them over the past two years have stopped making the masks or have folded because demand never took off.
Most cost between $15 and $40 each, and the filters, which should be replaced at least once a year, run about $5 each. Made of soft silicone, the masks are comfortable to wear, according to health care worker surveys, and they have a shelf life of a decade or more.
“It’s frustrating and frightening because a mask like this can make the difference between life and death, but no one knows about them,” said Claudio Dente, whose company, Dentec Safety, recently stopped making elastomeric respirators that were specifically redesigned at the request of federal regulators for health care workers.
I don’t know what to say. Suppose the government had invoked the Defense Protection Act right away to manufacture more of these right at the beginning? Then Health Care workers would have had the better masks (they filter out 99% of all particles) and the N95s could have been given to the public. (Obviously, the public isn’t going to use these.) Lives would have been saved.
I feel as if there’s something we don’t know about all this. But as the article shows, they used to recommend these masks but for some reason they didn’t do that with COVID. And why aren’t they being used and stockpiled in health care systems today?