Use, re-use or discard? Quantitatively defined variance in the functional integrity of N95 respirators following vaporized hydrogen peroxide decontamination during the COVID-19 pandemic
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.18.20177071: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: Human subjects approval: Experiments involving fit testing and decontamination of N95 respirators was part of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic and were thus considered exempt from institutional review board approval.
Consent: All participants gave informed consent prior to participating in any experiments.Randomization not detected. Blinding Fit Testing: Fit testing was administered following OSHA standard Appendix A to 1920.134 with minor modifications: 1) N95 respirators tested using both QLFTs and QTFTs underwent QLFTs first, 2) QLFT users were blinded to the order by which qualitative testing was administered (sweet followed by bitter). P… SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.18.20177071: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: Human subjects approval: Experiments involving fit testing and decontamination of N95 respirators was part of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic and were thus considered exempt from institutional review board approval.
Consent: All participants gave informed consent prior to participating in any experiments.Randomization not detected. Blinding Fit Testing: Fit testing was administered following OSHA standard Appendix A to 1920.134 with minor modifications: 1) N95 respirators tested using both QLFTs and QTFTs underwent QLFTs first, 2) QLFT users were blinded to the order by which qualitative testing was administered (sweet followed by bitter). Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources All statistical analysis was run using Prism 8 software. Prismsuggested: (PRISM, RRID:SCR_005375)Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Despite these limitations, the QTFT values were lower for 3M 1870 N95 respirators when they were lightly worn and fit tested by a second user compared to the other respirator models tested. It is also possible that some respirators may be less tolerant for reuse even by the same person, however we were unable to assess that in this study. Although, others have found a significant association between number of shifts N95 respirators were worn by a single user and failed QLFTs [21]. These data bring to light a significant obstacle for decontamination and reuse programs. A major unexpected result in this study was the inability to find many users who passed QTFTs on Gerson 1730, Gerson 2130, and Cardinal Health N95 models, despite these respirators representing 42% of passing QLFTs at UH. We therefore wondered if differences existed between QTFT and QLFT results specifically on these hard-to-fit models. Of the ten participants we recruited for QLFTs, six were able to pass at least one of the tasting challenges when qualitatively fit tested on Gerson 1730. Interestingly, only 1/6 of these participants was able to pass on the Gerson 1730 using a QTFT. This discrepancy between QLFTs and QTFTs may be attributed to taste insensitivity which has been shown to increase false positive fit testing [18,22] and could also be a symptom of COVID-19 infection [23–25]. Furthermore, anecdotal reports have indicated issues with competing taste profiles such as previously eaten foods or disinfect...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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