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

[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.