The Journal of hospital infection
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An exceptionally high demand for surgical masks and N95 filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs) during the COVID-19 pandemic has considerably exceeded their supply. These disposable devices are generally not approved for routine decontamination and re-use as a standard of care, while this practice has widely occurred in hospitals. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allowed it "as a crisis capacity strategy". However, limited testing was conducted on the impact of specific decontamination methods on the performance of N95 FFRs and no data was presented for surgical masks. ⋯ Strategies advocating decontamination and re-use of filtering facepieces in hospitals should be re-assessed considering the data obtained in this study.
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Inferring super-spreading from transmission clusters of COVID-19 in Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore.
Super-spreading events in an outbreak can change the nature of an epidemic. Therefore, it is useful for public health teams to determine whether an ongoing outbreak has any contribution from such events, which may be amenable to interventions. ⋯ This allowed us to infer the presence or absence of super-spreading events during the early phase of these outbreaks. The relatively large values of k implied that large cluster sizes, compatible with super-spreading, were unlikely.