Beyond the PPE shortage: Improperly fitting personal protective equipment and COVID-19 transmission among health care professionals

ABSTRACT

Background: Personal protective equipment (PPE) use is required when caring for COVID-19 patients. Proper mask fitting is essential in prevention of infectious agent transmission at hospital setting.Methods and Results: We describe three cases of health care professionals (HCP) in a COVID-19 designated ward with positive SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR results, and were found to have improperly fitted masks.Conclusion: These cases of improperly fitting masks in HCP may have contributed to their eventual COVID-19 infection. These cases raise the important issue of PPE fitting.

Abbreviations: Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Health Care Professional (HCP), Real-time PCR (RT-PCR)

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• personal protection equipment (PPE)
• facemask
• transmission
• N95
• transmission
• equipment
• testing

Declaration of interest

The contents of the paper and the opinions expressed within are those of the authors, and it was the decision of the authors to submit the manuscript for publication.

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.