As shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) reach critical levels across the country, finding a way to reuse this protective gear holds an opportunity to take a huge burden off of the medical community fighting the coronavirus. Happily, a care and sanitation company has managed to figure out a process to do exactly that, and it recently got FDA approval to go ahead and implement it.
Developed by Ohio-based company Battelle, the technology consists of large shipping containers that have been augmented to become super-efficient decontamination systems with a modular design, meaning they can be easily shipped and scaled up.
Hospitals around the country are starting to run low on personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves, and goggles. The looming shortage puts health care workers in danger as they treat the influx of COVID-19 patients. Battelle’s Critical Care Decontamination System is the first of its kind, capable of cleaning up to 80,000 pieces of PPE at a time.
Sunday night, the Food and Drug Administration gave Battelle full approval to ramp up their systems to full capacity and send devices to the parts of the country hardest hit by the coronavirus outbreak.
