More than a year into the novel coronavirus pandemic, we aren t certain how many Ohio nursing home workers died of COVID-19.
COVID-19 made working in a nursing home one of the deadliest jobs in America, according to an analysis of federal data by Scientific American magazine. Nursing home staffers had a higher death rate in 2020 than logging workers did in 2019, Scientific American found. The only group that had a higher death rate in 2019 were fishers.
“It just leaves me speechless,” said Meghan Finegan, assistant communications director for Service Employees International Union, which represents around two million employees across multiple industries, including nursing homes.
The letter is not an order: hospitals are still legally permitted to sterilize and reuse N95s. But in the coming weeks or months, the FDA will issue updated guidance and, eventually, require hospitals to revert to single-use, said Suzanne Schwartz, director of the FDA’s office of strategic partnerships and technology innovation.
“The ability to decontaminate was purely a last resort, an extreme measure,” Schwartz said. “From the FDA’s perspective, there is a need for us to move back towards contingency and conventional strategies, which is, you use the respirator for the interaction, and then you dispose of it and get a new one. We are in unison, in sync, with both NIOSH and OSHA in that position.”
The Biden administration has taken the first step toward ending an emergency exception that allowed hospitals to ration and reuse N95 medical masks, the first line of defense between frontline workers and the deadly coronavirus.
The heightened supply of N95 masks comes as President Joe Biden s administration moved to end the exception policy that allowed hospital workers to reuse and ration the masks that were previously
FDA: N95 masks, now plentiful, should no longer be reused
MARTHA MENDOZA and JULIET LINDERMAN, Associated Press
April 23, 2021
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FILE - In this Friday, May 8, 2020 file photo, a respiratory therapist pulls on a second mask over her N95 mask before adding a face shield as she gets ready to go into a patient s room in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit at a hospital in Seattle. Medical providers may soon return to using one medical N95 mask per patient, a practice that was suspended during the pandemic due to deadly supply shortages.Elaine Thompson/AP
The Biden administration has taken the first step toward ending an emergency exception that allowed hospitals to ration and reuse N95 medical masks, the first line of defense between frontline workers and the deadly coronavirus.