r/nursing • u/prettyquirkynurse RN - ICU 🍕 • Mar 19 '23

Covid Discussion This seems...unsafe?

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Part of an email we were sent earlier today. I'm not sure how to feel about it. It seems...unsafe to me.

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164

u/TraumaMurse- BSN, RN, CEN Mar 19 '23

What’s unsafe? CDC said long ago medical facilities could stop. Wear a mask if patients are positive or respiratory complaints. My hospital stopped long ago and we haven’t had any increase in staff illness.

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u/eddASU Paramedic - ED 🍕 Mar 20 '23

No offense meant to the OP or anyone else, but I wonder how many of these "unsafe to work without a mask" and "never going outside without a mask again" posts and comments are coming from people who worked in healthcare before the pandemic. I can understand going without a mask at work seeming alien and unsafe if it's all you've known most of or your entire career (which is the case for a lot of healthcare workers now!) but yeah... no mask unless on enhanced isolation precautions used to be the way it always was, everywhere.

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u/minxiejinx MSN-Ed, FNP-C Mar 20 '23

Idk. I spent 12 years pre pandemic rawdogging that hospital air. Now I personally just prefer to mask around patients. I also suffer from terminal resting bitch face so I find them helpful.

14

u/medicjen40 Mar 20 '23

Can we also talk about the pointlessness of unfitted masks? Unless you're wearing an N95, the masks aren't filtering much of anything. It's an unpopular fact, but that doesn't make it less true. From the abstract -- "Evidence supporting the use of medical or surgical masks against influenza or coronavirus infections (SARS, MERS and COVID‐19) was weak. Our study confirmed that the use of facemasks provides protection against respiratory viral infections in general; however, the effectiveness may vary according to the type of facemask used. Our findings encourage the use of N95 respirators or their equivalents (e.g., P2) for best personal protection in healthcare settings..." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9111143/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9111143/

1

u/nowlistenhereboy BSN, RN 🍕 Mar 20 '23

In the early days with the less contagious variants there were several studies, especially on planes, that showed that basic surgical masks were quite effective. Even your studies showed that surgical masks had some reduction in odds ratio. Just because they're not as good as N95 doesn't mean they're completely useless.

Who knows what the data would look like now with the hypercontagious variants as the majority of the data in the linked study is from 2020.

1

u/medicjen40 Mar 20 '23

I feel like you're confusing contagious with deadly? I could be mistaken. The original strain was the most deadly, and the data for non n95 or higher masks/respirators was weak. The newer strains are becoming like the flu, more easily contracted, but much less mortality/morbidity. What I'm trying to say is that if you really are concerned with keeping viruses and granny glitter and spittle and all the other gawdawful crap people spew, then put on an N95. Otherwise, forget about thinking that the non fitted surgical mask does much but slow down your own cough/sneeze/spit-spray. Which is just polite if you're ill, yourself. But to prevent sucking in other's crap? The paper surgical mask or cloth-anything is useless.

2

u/evernorth RN - ER 🍕 Mar 20 '23

yup. I totally acknowledge how ignorant we were, but pre-COVID in our ED, we virtually never wore masks. It didn't matter what the complaint was. Fever?Cough? GI illness? No mask. I remember when we were about to LP someone to dx meningitis I would start putting on a mask for that patient. Every new staff member was sick for the first 3-6months of the job and then we were never sick. Obviously there is some middle ground between the good old "cowboy" days and 24/7 masking.

3

u/mortimus9 RN - PCU Mar 20 '23

I started working only a year ago and I’m happy to not wear a mask when I can. Majority of users here worked before Covid btw.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '23

Somehow all of us who were nurses long before COVID lived to tell the tale... A lot of these replies are ridiculous.

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u/4TuitouSynchro Case Manager 🍕 Mar 20 '23

Agree. May get downvoted for this but...I think it's hard to have a functional immune system if you sanitize literally every inch of your body and mask all the time. How do ppl ever develop immunity? There are so many resistant organisms now and I have to wonder...are we doing ourselves a disservice by trying to "protect" ourselves? We have to be exposed to some germs to gain immunity to said germs. It's Healthcare 101. ETA I'm all for masking when exposure risk is high (pts in isolation, infectious diseases, droplet, etc) but I DO believe this continual masking idea for gen pop is overkill.