Maybe drop them in a bucket of boiling water would be better
I have to travel to Dallas tomorrow from NH. I have tried to think of every way possible to get out of this business trip. Unfortunately our company was purchased in December. I was with my new boss last week and I made a comment that I might have to start working from home because of the coronavirus and the fact that I have asthma so that puts me at risk. He started laughing. Great.
I was even thinking maybe I could fall and break my leg so that I could avoid this trip and magically I could self-quarantine at home. Lol
I plan to wear a mask while I am traveling tomorrow and I was wondering what I was going to do at the hotel. I only have 10 good masks so I need to be frugal and figure out how to reuse. If I carefully remove with latex gloves and hold an antibacterial wipe over the end of the hair dryer, I can disinfect and heat at the same time.
desperate measures…
UV wand light on both sides for 30 seconds AND the 9 day rotation scheme.
This just happened, had to share this with y’all. It’s a friend of a friend story, but I trust the friend.
Recently there was a patient in a small community hospital with pneumonia and sepsis. The plan was to transport the patient to a nearby large city for treatment and to rule out Covid-19. The friend’s friend is a flight nurse who was asked to transport the patient via helicopter, but he refused stating that they had a ground crew with specialized equipment for such patients. No mention of the protective gear that they had on the helicopter outside of masks.
There are two things that I find disturbing about this. The first is that someone was going to transfer this patient in a way that could potentially endanger others; the second is that the nurse refused to participate. (not that I blame him to be sure)
This is the intersection of ignorant leadership and workers being placed in potentially dangerous situations. We saw the same thing here in Dallas when the ICU nurses caring for the ebola patients themselves contracted ebola because their training and gear were wholly inadequate.
It won’t take much for the people “on the front lines” to ignore the overfed meeting attenders and clipboard holders when asked to do something dangerous. This same dynamic is happening on a national scale as evidenced by our own “authorities”. Their obvious self interest and focus on protecting the economy first has eroded trust. I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise, fourth turning and all.
I was drying out a shirt the other day that I had spilled a little water on. It gets VERY hot very quickly, way beyond 100 deg. and I doubt you’d even need 5 minutes to sterilize it. Even if it took 5 minutes (by which time I would almost wonder if the mask might reach combustible temperatures), it’s a very brief time when compared to the alternative eternity one may face. Great idea! You dry out any humidity in the mask and sterilize it at the same time…
I wouldn’t wet a mask to disinfect it. Heat or UVlight would be safer. A UV baby bottle sterilizer could work if you exposed both sides. Also a warm 200F oven will work, but might destroy the elastic in the mask. Google some articles on those two approaches. I think there is more risk in our thoughtless habits than in how we disinfect our PPE.
I work in an acute care hospital. Four weeks ago one of the nurses I work with said TPTB should have shut down the borders with China. She’s right. All health care workers (doctors, nurses, therapists etc are all on the front lines of patient care) We all have families. Once the staff feels like we are being left out to hang, all bets are off. There is a strong sense of us vs them. The suits vs. the front line staff who makes the engine run. The suits will be making economic decisions without regard for staff or patients. FWIW, our performance reviews come due in March. Guess what they dropped off the review? Compassionate care. Go figure.
Some good points about the downside of using a hair dryer and heat to disinfect a mask. With the limited supply of masks initially, very few of us have enough to use them once and then dispose of them, so we are going to have to find ways to reuse them safely.
Lets look at some of the factors that will affect the process of disinfecting a mask for reuse.
First thing that comes to my mind is “removal of a infected mask”.
You will have to establish a process to remove your mask, probably at the end of you “de-gowning” (for the lack of a better word, describing the process of taking off your street clothing and putting on you inside clothing) that doesn’t damage the mask and allows it to be processed.
For one use and disposal, you wouldn’t need to worry about damage.
Ideally you’d want the mask to go right into the disinfecting process, whether that is just putting it on a shelf for 9 day quarantine or a type of chemical bath (bleach, H2O2, vinegar, or other disinfecting agent).
You could put it into a sealable container for later disinfecting, like you would do for you street clothing, taken off and put into a garbage bag, which is sealed then taken to be washed.
While using a hair blow drier would certainly risk secondary infections, by blowing the virus off the mask and onto other surfaces, I could see putting the mask into a glass container with lid that could be placed in an oven, and then subjected to a period of moderate heat (low enough it doesn’t melt the elastic bands on the typical mask.
Of course this brings up the possibility of cross infection of your cooking oven if the virus got out of the container and you didn’t spend significant time under heat to kill it. A secondary oven/heat source might be called for and be a safe option. You could possibly rig up a small box at a window, where a heat source like a hair blow dryer, blows hot air on the mask, then vents the waste air outside your home.
Heat treatment also has the downside that it uses energy. Something you may not have.
UV light has promise but uses energy, and only disinfects the surface. Its safe to assume that virus particles will penetrate the weave of any paper mask from the act of breathing, as it pulls air and virus particles into the mask.
More sturdy respirators have a two part disinfection process. The main body of the respirator could be cleaned by wiping it down with chemicals (or wipes). The filters (probably flat pancake filters) are cloth and probably will stand up to more damage when disinfected than paper masks, though they have a plastic part which can’t be damaged or it won’t fit back onto the mask or will provide a poor seal and possible infection routes.
You will though likely have less filters, perhaps only 2-3 for a respirator, meaning you may have a time consideration and need quicker disinfection than just physical quarantine will allow.
On the other side, any DIY masks will probably be less resilient to cleaning and disinfecting. Ways to make those DIY masks cheaply and practical to use once and throw away would be indicated. Or if they are cloth based, then ways to wash them and still keep them effective are needed,
Self quarantining of a mask, is the most energy efficient, and easiest. It is also likely that you won’t need 9 masks in rotation. Unless you are going out every day, any day you don’t, means you won’t need a mask, nor have one to disinfect.
It is also the longest method in time to complete disinfection. A factor if you don’t have many masks.
Chemical treatment takes less time, and the chemicals themselves have a long active shelf life but can degrade the material of the mask, potentially rendering them non-protective. More data needs to be found to tell us if such degradation happens and how much it does.
Also the characteristics of the chemical used must be considered. Bleach is the cheapest but is a respatorial irritant, perhaps not something you want breathing in. Using a water rinse is probably best.
Time based quarantine, would require individual places or containers, so that later entries wouldn’t accidentally contaminate the older masks and then require restarting the time clock on them.
Chemical baths risk spillage of the containers, or you running out of chemicals.
A secondary concern is that any mask worn for a length of time will be moist from your breath. This added water may affect the time and efficiency of any disinfecting method. Or help, high humidity and high heat have been shown to degrade or kill this virus.
None of this mandates you chose just one method. You could run one or more depending on your activity and weekly mask usage or the amount of masks you have on hand.
Given the few mask that many of us have, the fact we may not be able to get any more any time soon, and that some of us will be forced to use DIY methods of masking, we need to figure out the various ways to disinfect a mask safely and efficiently.
ADDED: Perhaps you could put the mask into a small container, carry it into your bathroom, put it in the bathtub, then use the hair dryer? That way any blown virus should stay in the tub and settle on the surface. Remove the mask and container, spray the area with disinfectant, wait 10 minutes then have a shower and wash the mess down the drain.
Though I’m not sure if drying droplets would be light enough to aerosol before the virus dies. If that were to happen, the virus would then be airborne in the shower enclosure and bathroom.
I ventured out for a day of fun.
Before we go full tilt black swan.
Anyway, Dollar Tree Fredericksburg Virginia, fully stocked.
Riding the metro in DC, absolutely nothing unusual.
Though, it occurred to me… I am only one of a few people I know prepping. So, I pick a day out in Washington DC, ride the metro through DCA Airport, to spend a few hours in the crowded Spy Museum.
I have never had a germ phobia. I believe in getting your kids to play in dirt. But sitting on the metro, at the international airport… I was kind of wishing I had brought some Lysol wipes.
How about this:
- preheat oven to about 170-200°.
- Place mask in oven (in a covered glass container will take longer, so maybe just on a tray?). Cover oven vents (usually in the center of the back right burner and in the top of the door) to prevent air exchange between oven and the room.
- Leave mask for sufficient time (20-30 minutes?)
- Remove mask and turn oven to 250° or higher to sterilize.
I heard from a medical resident I know from church that this week the CDC is sending out thousands of test kits in the USA. More to follow in coming weeks. If serious testing finally gets underway in all 50 states then then the US case count should skyrocket.
I’m hesitant to put an infected mask into my cooking oven, but what about a cheap crock pot as a heating chamber? It wouldn’t need any airflow like a blow dryer. Has a lid, though that doesn’t seal well but you could buy one at a garage sale, thrift market or just a cheap one, and set it up at your door. You wouldn’t have to carry a potential risk across your home to the kitchen either.
Incoming masks go into it for a set time, based on how hot it takes to not destroy the rubber bands. Need a good thermometer and a few masks to experiment with, but some of us with a good supply could run the numbers than post them here so people with less wouldn’t risk destroying one of theirs. Put it on a timer and walk away from it.
As long as you had electricity, you could get by with just a few masks, or even DIY masks too.
You could use the crock pot to disinfect other things not heat sensitive like your keys, though not your cell phone. Use a UV sterilizer for things heat sensitive like the cell phone, credit card or your glasses.
You should be able to disinfect quite a few things with a suitable period of heat. I’m planning to drop my regular baseball cap for a knit cap to wear over my hair and under my goggles. That could easily go into a crock pot and the heat would penetrate clean thru it. Might shrink it a bit though.
Nice thing is its not an obvious corona virus need or essential items, so they should still be available after the run on supplies in a week or more.
The more I think of this option the better I like it.
Disaster princess now has 1% fatalities with virtually all cases unresolved and 36 in serious/critical/ So this is a closed sample - we should be able to extrapolate a real CFR from the random closed sample.
Now the US has a 2nd death - with its Fantasy POWER Medical System …CFR is now at 2% and climbing - as almost all infected in the US are unresolved.
Ok, so these buying panics have happened twice here in Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia). The first time was in late January before we got back, and apparently it got started when someone posted some empty shelves at a store on Facebook. A fair number of people hit the stores and emptied some store shelves, but the stores had almost everything restocked within a day or two. The second time was when someone on Facebook claimed that a suspected case in Khuvsgul died and his family was in quarantine (the gov’t said it was ‘fake news’ and fined the poster… hard to say if it was gov’t coverup or not). Again, stores were back to normal within a couple days easy.
Our local E-mart grocery supermarket the week after the first panic buying event
To be fair there’s a few differences… some stores here don’t operate with as narrow a ‘just-in-time’ supply window as the US (so they keep more quantity in stock), and the average Mongolian has much less discretionary income than the average American to panic buy & hoard things. But Mongolians have been dealing with this constant collective anxiety about coronavirus for over a month now, and the grocery stores still have almost everything they normally do in stock. Here it’s not that shelves are stripped bare, but rather we simply have a handful of certain products that are near impossible to get. N95 & surgical masks, hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, and Theraflu products stand out most in my mind (liquid bleach can be kinda hard to find but is usually in stock somewhere). So for these items and other things like elderberry syrup and certain medicines, it might be close to the last day to prepare and get these things. But soap, most foods, toilet paper, and bottled water can be found anywhere. I can’t guarantee America is going to experience the same thing we’re seeing, but my guess it’ll be similar.
It’s always smart to keep several weeks’ worth of food & household consumables on hand, but the odds one will be impacted by a layoff or be sick and out of work for a month from this whole thing are far, FAR higher than society will break down to a point where the garage half-full of bottled water and 500lbs of freeze-dried food will be essential. There’s a place for that stuff, but I don’t see how it’s a priority for THIS situation.
BTW, last Friday my wife’s hospital had a suspected coronavirus patient and they promptly closed up the hospital. Fortunately the patient tested negative the next morning (hopefully that won’t change over time), but we were steeling ourselves for the possibility of a quarantine-at-home situation for a couple weeks or even being sent to the government’s quarantine facility. This is a thing that it makes sense to prepare for… simply being ready to stay closed in at home for several weeks and having enough money to pay the rent and bills until you get back to work. Oh, and be prepared to have the kids staying at home during the day instead of going to school. We’ve been doing that here in Mongolia for over a month now, and it’s likely parts of America will see it soon too.
I’m not saying that preparing now is a bad thing, just don’t get drawn into the panicked sense of urgency seen in some of those Costcos. If what I’ve seen holds true there, there will be other opportunities to go to the store after the panic subsides. Going to an overpacked Costco not only will cost you time, but do you really want to be around such large, packed crowds NOW? 
The ultimate mask solution. Why does everyone think they are going to be out and about, running around as usual?? If you have limited PPE gear, stay put. Your life will change from now on. Good luck.
Hello
Risk assessment needed.
Worst case scenario…What do you lose?
If travel …risk …health and actually life perhaps.
If postpone lose money/time/fun.
I am 60 and would not think of travel by air now.
Ex UN staff Emergency Response UNISDR UNICEF UNDP OCHA
Thank you,
Great post, thanks
For the majority of PP viewers, we have the benefit of time to plan and stock up on water, food and other preps–for now. But when those run out, we may find ourselves bartering and coordinating multi-family or neighborhood group purchases for those items that may be still available.
‘No one cares’: Wuhan residents adapt to find food during coronavirus lockdown
‘“I still don’t know where to buy things once we’ve finished eating what we have at home,” said Pan Hongsheng, who lives with his wife and two children.
Some neighbourhoods have organised group-buying services, where supermarkets deliver orders in bulk.
But in Pan’s community, “no one cares”.
“The three-year-old doesn’t even have any milk powder left,” Pan told AFP, adding that he has been unable to send medicine to his in-laws — both in their eighties — as they live in a different area.
“I feel like a refugee.”’
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2020/03/01/no-one-cares-wuhan-residents-adapt-find-food-coronavirus-lockdown/
I have washed a lot of particulate masks and resused them without problems - they generally holdup well. However, the real question is do you lose function with washing of N95. I am not sure this is enough if we are really worrying about airborned - except in very low concentrations. So washing should be enough - bleach is obviously corrosive , so I wouldnt use this … I think hydrogen peroxide or even alcohol bath would work. even a good pure bar soap should work. The question is does the washing effect the electrostatic charge of the mask that gives its some of its filteration? I would guess it would be compromised by any moisture even wearing or washing or heating… - I am wondering about UVC and ozone. UVC can deteriorate fabrics but I think it would be minimal - yu should get a few cleanings. and it would problably have the least effect on static processes. Does it penetrate? sure the mask is a filter… just how much time you need may depend how long you used the mask and viral concentration… but it should work doing both sides. Ozone will penetrate as well - it can be corrosive and it can effect the electrostatic actions of the filter. I would say UVC is proably the best way to keep the mask functional… just need to do both sides - and about 3 times as longer than general surface requirements.
Authorities announce 2nd coronavirus death in US
“SEATTLE (AP) — Health officials in Washington state said Sunday night that a second person had died from the coronavirus — a man in his 70s from a nursing facility near Seattle where dozens of people were sick and had been tested for the virus.”
https://apnews.com/ba5ece6010e0eddf5b0af63e6e5ad880