- On the first day of its total confinement to break the chains of diffusion of the coronavirus, France suffers from a lack of protective masks.
- Individuals, nursing staff in hospitals or in town medicine: everyone wants it.
- Tutorials for making your own protective masks have emerged on the Internet. If they can reassure individuals, caregivers are recalcitrant.
As coveted as gold and even more untraceable than a package of toilet paper. While France is experiencing its very first day of total confinement on Tuesday to try to stem the coronavirus epidemic, there is one product that everyone would like to get their hands on: protective masks. Individuals go - in vain - around pharmacies to get them, and caregivers, city or hospital, are sounding the alarm in the face of stocks that are shrinking like pain.
President Macron promised Monday evening that stocks would be quickly delivered as a priority to the 25 departments most affected by the Covid-19, but for now, many are concerned about this shortage and are trying to find ways to protect. "How to make your protective mask". "Sewing tutorial: sewing a protective mask". Online, tips for making a mask are blooming. But are they reliable? Can they protect from the Covid-19 as an FFP2 mask, approved and whose reliability is guaranteed? Not sure, no.
A tutorial offered by the CHU of Grenoble Alpes
"The nursing staff of a teaching hospital invited to make their own masks". It might sound like a dubious joke during a pandemic, but that is the reality. Friday, March 13, the CHU Grenoble Alpes sent its medical staff a document inviting them, faced with the risk of a shortage of protective masks, to make their own models of fabric. Dimensions, materials to be used and even patterns to have the exact form of the mask available, the direction of the CHU proposed a tutorial so that doctors, nurses or even nursing assistants can make a protection to use from the day when stocks of approved masks will be dry.
“In the context of a degraded situation and to remedy the possible shortage of care masks, a model for the creation of care masks in textiles is proposed to enable protection, to continue one's professional activity, to allow (…) in charge of patients ”, indicates the management in the document. A proposal applicable, however, to personnel "not taking care of Covid-19 patients". By discovering this tutorial, an emergency doctor from Samu first believed in "a fake", ensuring that "these masks are useless", before discovering that it was not a joke.
" It's better than nothing "
Such tutorials for individuals have also multiplied on the Internet, and can reassure anyone who is afraid of exposing themselves by going shopping or going to work when continuing their activity from a distance is impossible. “We see a lot of people with cloth masks, quite covering on the face. Without having masks bought in pharmacies, it still protects a little, even if the double thickness with cotton fabric and a piece of fleece makes the model must be thick enough, so not very breathable, so enough uncomfortable, "says Dr. Jean-Paul Hamon, general practitioner at Clamart and president of the Federation of Doctors of France (FMF)
But do these artisanal creations have their place in hospitals, ambulances or even city medicine? Do they offer effective protection? "It's better than nothing," replied Dr. Hamon with resignation. I even tried to mobilize the knitters of my city so that they make these artisan masks. Given the glaring failure of the administration, we unfortunately end up tinkering with solutions that are not really! When I read today that Agnes Buzyn is crying over her rout at the municipal level and having left her ministry, she should cry for her catastrophic management of the epidemic, cry for not having stored enough protective masks! "
For the general practitioner, the question of using a cloth mask himself in the context of his activity no longer arises. “I have just been tested positive for Covid-19, I was infected by examining a febrile diabetic patient. My partner was also infected. For the rest of my colleagues, the situation will quickly become critical: the stock of FFP2 mask is almost sold out and we clearly cannot receive patients without safe protection, whose effectiveness is no longer to be proven. This is unacceptable. Last week, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, assured me that a delivery of masks was imminent, but a week later, we still did not receive anything ”.
"I will never put my teams to work with homemade masks"
Other personnel on the front line, the paramedics work in concert with the Samu of France to take care of possible or proven cases of Covid-19 and transport them to the hospital. For them, maximum protective equipment is essential. "Coveralls, charlotte, gloves, special glasses and of course protective mask must be systematically worn by our paramedics and changed entirely between each patient," says Yannick Janeiro, president of the National Federation of Emergency Ambulance Technicians (FNTAU). With the progression of the Covid-19 epidemic in France, “people are afraid to go to the hospital, this frees us up to focus on taking care of probable or confirmed cases of coronavirus. This represents in recent days more than 80% of the activity of paramedics.
But if human resources "are widely mobilized, if we do not have masks, we can no longer work at all, warns Yannick Janeiro. However, very concretely, I have a dozen protective masks left, whereas today, I have made around fifteen interventions. This means that if my colleagues and I do not receive a delivery of masks on Tuesday, we lower the curtain. And for the moment, we have not received any information relating to any replenishment ”. Are artisan masks the solution to alleviate this shortage? "Certainly not," replied Yannick Janeiro categorically. As business manager and president of FNTAU, I will not take the responsibility of sending my teams to work and to be exposed to this coronavirus without a safe and certified material with health standards. I will never make them work with homemade masks ”.
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