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COVID-19 pandemic and the need for PPEs

COVID-19 pandemic is rapidly spreading across countries and regions, causing huge impact on people’s lives and communities. The dramatic rise in demand for surgical masks, goggles, gloves, and gowns has depleted their stockpiles, prompted significant price increases, and led to production backlogs of months in fulfilling orders.
The COVID-19 death rate in India is 3.16 percent; Europe is 9.53 percent; North America is 5.64 percent; Asia is 3.63 percent; South America is 4.66 percent; Africa is 4.31 percent; Oceania is 1.23 percent; and the entire world is 6.90 percent.

The COVID-19 mortality per million population is 5.7 deaths in Asia; 131 in Europe; 42.88 in North America; 167 in USA; 0.7 in India; and 0.58 in Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. It is true that death per million population in Asian countries is much lower than in Europe and in North America, but even that 1 per million population can become a big number if the disease is not brought under control in the next few weeks.

A time will come when the hotspots will be in the healthcare facilities, which are closed environment with central air-conditioning and are visited by positive patients, whether symptomatic or asymptomatic. The only way to protect further progression of the pandemic is to break the chain of spread of coronavirus through the healthcare facilities by providing them enough personal protective equipment (PPE), which are inclusive of impermeable head cover, shoe cover, nitrile non-powdered gloves, impermeable gown or apron, and goggles-cum-face shields.

The quality of PPE must be properly checked because any fault at any level can spread the infection. Surgical mask must be three layered with inner layer hydrophilic and outer layer hydrophobic with middle layer made up of a filter. People are selling fake surgical masks, which are either two-layered or three-layered, all made up of one type of a material, which is hydrophilic or hydrophobic, or placing a carbon filter in place of a pathogen filter. Not only availability of PPE important, proper training is also needs to be given for their use and disposal. If someone is using the PPE for extended use or reusing them, proper guidelines need to be followed under the hospital offline policy.

While the Epidemic Diseases Act is in place with the national list of essential medicines, and NPPA has the powers to freeze the price of the PPE and the same has been done, it is unfortunate that the price has not been frozen the way was for cardiac stents and implants.

If the Indian government subsidizes and gives incentives to start-ups to manufacture PPE in India and ensures a minimum order, so that the supplier may break even, there is no reason why PPEs cannot be made available under Make in India initiative at throwaway prices.

For Indians, these can be available at a very cheap price and revenue can be generated by selling them across the world with a reasonable margin. In the past whenever a pandemic has occurred, all the vaccines and other research has gone waste as after the products were ready, the government did not procure them under the national programs.

Not only manufacturing important but equally important is their disposal under biomedical waste. Today, most clinics are not equipped to dispose off the PPEs as their disposal bags and buckets are very small, which are not capable of handling two or three persons’ PPE at a time.

Today, India needs one PPE for each healthcare provider whenever they are on duty. The estimate is that the requirement will be at least 2 million sets per day. If that is so, any industry would be able to make them at a throwaway price.

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