1 foot forward, 2 noses back

[adrian_turtle]

I just got email from my friendly neighborhood hospital network. They've been monitoring the local levels of contagious viral illness, and found they are decreasing. (Happy spring! Yay!) They have reached a low enough level that "employees are no longer required to wear masks during direct interactions with patients," though they will continue to monitor conditions.

If a patient wants a clinician to wear a mask, feel free to ask. Remember they don't have to if they don't want to.

If patients or visitors want to wear other masks or respirators, they are required to wear surgical masks on top of them in order to impair the fit. Layering masks only causes the underlying N95 to leak 13% of the time, so it's not a reliable way to cause leakage. It's just so annoying, because the hospital is not requiring everybody in the room to mask. You can walk around unmasked, wearing a surgical mask, or wearing a surgical mask over an N95. It's only the safest option, the N95 alone, that is forbidden. I don't expect the new rule to be enforced, but it still distresses me.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-wearing-surgical-masks-over-n95s-can-cause-dangerous-leaks

Comments

[evalerie]

Wow. That is just baffling.

I think people hear the word "surgical" and think it must be the best possible type of mask, and then make bad decisions based on that. But I would expect a hospital system to get the facts right!

Also, I am still frustrated that during the pandemic we discovered that masking dramatically reduces the spread of disease -- a modern-day equivalent of the discovery of hand washing -- and then at some point hospitals stopped doing it.

[adrian_turtle]

They don't actually say "surgical." They say "a facility-issued face mask." I've seen the ones they wear and hand out at the doors, and I recognize them as surgical masks. I'm not sure if people see the word "surgical" and think they're the best, or if they just think they're the most medical-ish and most appropriate for a hospital. Some of my relatives live in California and keep N95 masks around in case they need smoke protection during wildfire season. Covid protection? One thinks of that as a medical problem, so she would use a medical mask. Another would prefer to use essential oils on a scarf and cover her face with that.

[evalerie]

Hm. How to say what I'm thinking of without naming names....

This is off on a tangent, to clarify what I was saying about the halo of the word "surgical," and not a direct response to what you said: At some point Person A sent me a picture of a person who I care about, Person B, who is in her 90s and was wearing a surgical mask around people who had Covid. I sent Person B some N-95 masks to give her better protection. But Person B said that they messed with her hair, and Person A seems to have disposed of them. Person A explained to me that Person B has access to perfectly good surgical masks and doesn't need those weird other ones that mess with her hair. Sigh.

[silveradept]

This is the baffling, sometimes maddening, situation involved - we did a thing that brought infections under control, but now that they're lowered, we're going to stop doing the thing that brought them under control. And in a little while, we'll have to reinstitute the controls because infections went up.

We will never understand the correlation.

[adrian_turtle]

It really is baffling. Even more baffling than the time when we (I mean, our ancestors) discovered fruit juice prevented scurvy, tried it for a while, and then backed away from the practice for a generation. At least they were understandably confused by the fact that using boiled juice doesn't work.