Decontamination and re-use of N95 and surgical masks

The COVID-19 pandemic has spontaneously brought together researchers across the world enabling unique scientific collaborations.  The scarcity of N95 masks for health-care workers spurred efforts to decontaminate and re-use such masks.  A simple low-cost setup to measure the particle filtration efficiency of different masks has helped us evaluate several heat-based decontamination strategies, especially for low-resources. Based on protocols developed at TIFR a heat-based decontamination setup has been deployed at Tata Memorial Hospital, allowing the re-use of several thousands of N95 masks. Apart from this, I would highlight several interesting observations on mask filtration efficiencies that are relevant especially in a market flooded with many variants of masks, making different claims to their efficiency, re-usability etc.