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comment by veen
veen  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 25, 2020

Might be more effective to help figure out how to best re-use masks:

kleinbl00





b_b  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

A heartening email I received from a Emergency physician friend who spends half her time in the upper peninsula of Michigan, after I sent her the above info:

    How about the small rural communities. I came back last week to Iron River, MI and quarantained at home, distance myself at much as possible...RURAL COMMUNITIES are completely defenseless. We have currently, because it is winter around 3000-4000 people, but we have only 4 vents and one need to stay clean for emergency surgeries. There are 4 ICU beds only. They only can be staffed for 3-4 days as per federal rules, which have not changed. The monther (sic) hospital in Wisconsin says they will make room for 50 more patients.... but Aspirus Hospital cover the whole western UP, this are about 50.000 to 70.000 mostly elderly people with various co-morbities! THIS IS NOT ENOUGH! [Our large hospital system in Detroit] has sufficient resources and can actually overbid other systems when it come purchasing power, here we do not have this. I fear we will have worse case fatality numbers than other countries, but we won't test, so we won't know.
veen  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

One thing I only realized when I talked to my parents yesterday is that a lockdown is the best thing ever precisely for rural areas. Their province has only 10 cases on 650k people when our semi-lockdowns began. They're behind, so they benefit the most from blanket measures.

ecib  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3Af048c853-7e1d-4715-b73d-3b506b274a30

Interesting paper that suggest dry or steam sterilization at 121 C might be a kind of sweet spot for making masks re-usable. One hospital reported that 134 C deformed the masks, which is not desirable for re-use, but the 121 temp had good results.

Hospitals have autoclaves and could do this. Even a clothes steamer with mask in baggie would work nicely, though dialing in the temp might be finicky. I've seen some folks suggest dry heat from rice cooker as well. Even a pressure cooker I bet could get good results.

kleinbl00  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I've repurposed my 405nm resin curing light to cooking my mask, my keys and my phone. There's every evidence that sitting your mask under one of those nail-curing lamps ($20 on Amazon) will kill the SHIT out of coronavirus in 20 minutes.

b_b  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

In the doc that veen shared, they caution slightly against UV for the reason that it may degrade the masks after repeated exposure, although it was just as good for a single cleaning as heating.

kleinbl00  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Right but stickin'em over steam for ten minutes is gonna be fiiiiine.

They said that because the CDC, for some reason, is radically anti-UV sterilization and because since none of them know any fucking thing about materials science obviously their technique is superior.

Say dumb shit on twitter: scarmonger

say dumb shit on Elsevier: visionary

Creativity  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks veen!

b_b  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks for this. Passed it on to my ER buddies

veen  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Linked pdf is worth reading.

mk bugski! Edit is weird, it removed the @ and moved the tweet up?

am_Unition  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Don't try to edit comments or posts with embedded tweets. It inverts the order of paragraphs. One of my favorite bugs so far.

mk  ·  1489 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hm. Will examine. Thanks.