Nurse Mike Gulick was meticulous about not bringing the novel coronavirus home to his wife and their 2-year-old daughter. He’d stop at a hotel after work just to take a shower. He’d wash his clothes in Lysol disinfectant. They did a tremendous amount of handwashing.
But at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, Gulick and his colleagues worried that caring for infected patients without first being able to don an N95 respirator mask was risky. The N95 mask filters out 95% of all airborne particles, including ones too tiny to be blocked by regular masks. But administrators at his hospital said they weren’t necessary and didn’t provide them, he said.
His wife, also a nurse, not only wore an N95 mask, but covered it with a second air-purifying respirator while she cared for COVID-19 patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center across town in Los Angeles.
Source: AP News