Mask Reuse in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Creating an Inexpensive and Scalable Ultraviolet System for Filtering Facepiece Respirator Decontamination.

As the current COVID-19 pandemic illustrates, not all hospitals and other patient care facilities are equipped with enough personal protective equipment to meet the demand in a crisis. Health care workers around the world use filtering facepiece respirators to protect themselves and their patients, yet during this global pandemic they are forced to reuse what are intended to be single-use masks. This poses a significant risk to these health care workers along with the people they are trying to protect.