A local health group is calling on B.C. to reinstate and improve health-care mask protections in medical settings.<\/p>\n
In March 2025, the Province dropped its health-care mask requirement<\/a>. DoNoHarm BC, an organization advocating for it to be reinstated, had been hoping that they would do so once respiratory illness season<\/a> started last fall.<\/p>\n \u201cWe watched other provinces reenact these seasonal mask mandates, and waited and waited,\u201d Beth Campbell Duke, a science educator, told Daily Hive. \u201cWe had a letter-writing campaign, and still there was no response.\u201d<\/p>\n While people who are immunocompromised or immunosuppressed are most at risk, she said that it poses a risk to everyone because no one knows how COVID-19 infection could impact them.<\/p>\n Campbell Duke\u2019s husband is a lung transplant recipient and now a cancer patient, so she directly deals with the consequences of the Province\u2019s decision to remove the mandate and not reinstate it.<\/p>\n When the BC Ministry of Health dropped the mandate, they said they still encourage people to wear medical masks in health-care settings. But Campbell Duke said that without a mandate, she doesn\u2019t see this happening.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople within health care, they seem to require a mandate in order to wear a mask,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s really upsetting to me to see other people who, in theory, have more background in biology than I do, who don\u2019t seem to understand or grasp or take on board that\u00a0 there\u2019s still an airborne issue.\u201d<\/p>\n In the last month, 25 to 45 per cent of hospitalized COVID patients each week were infected in health care, according to Dr. Karina Zeidler, a family physician and co-founder of\u00a0Protect Our Province BC.<\/p>\n \u201cEven\u00a0without\u00a0hospitalization, many of these infections have long-term consequences, from\u00a0organ\u00a0damage and\u00a0immune issues\u00a0to increased risks of\u00a0cancer\u00a0and\u00a0dementia. It\u2019s unconscionable that we aren\u2019t doing everything we can to reduce these risks,\u201d Dr. Zeidler said in a press release.<\/p>\n Studies show that if staff started masking again, there could be a 33 per cent decrease in hospital-onset respiratory viral infections. N95-style masks can reduce exhaled viral load by 98 per cent and provide full protection for health-care workers.<\/p>\n DoNoHarm BC says that each preventable hospital stay costs the health-care system over $8,000 on average, and an average COVID hospitalization costs over $24,000.<\/p>\n It takes a personal toll, too. Duke Campbell is the caregiver for her husband, and she faces an extra burden in ensuring that a health-care setting is safe for them to enter.<\/p>\n \u201cI phone ahead and ask about the ventilation and whether people will wear an N95.\u201d<\/p>\n If a health-care provider won\u2019t wear a mask, they\u2019ll move the appointment to the phone. If an office doesn\u2019t have good ventilation, she said they arrange \u201cparking lot appointments.\u201d<\/p>\n They also bring with them a carbon dioxide monitor to observe the air quality, which helps them determine how well ventilated a space is.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know of other patients who have contracted COVID during their checkups; it\u2019s one of the reasons we\u2019re super cautious. And they are alive, but they certainly aren\u2019t okay,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Concerns about the former mask mandate<\/p>\n Campbell Duke stressed the importance of wearing N95 masks. The common blue medical masks don\u2019t have the proper fit or filter to be effective, with gaps on the sides through which droplets can exit.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re very leaky,\u201d she said. \u201cThose masks aren\u2019t going to stop airborne transmission of pathogens.\u201d<\/p>\n Even when the mask mandate in medical settings was in place, Campbell Duke said it was for the \u201cpoorly fitted medical masks.\u201d<\/p>\n She said the mandate also had a loophole that \u201cyou could drive a truck through.\u201d It required health-care staff to wear masks only in patient-facing areas, and she would observe medical staff and administrators without masks in places like hallways.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could drive a truck through the loopholes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A local health group is calling on B.C. to reinstate and improve health-care mask protections in medical settings.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471413,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":["post-471412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}