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Healthcare workers at Tygerberg Hospital are wearing modified snorkel masks to help keep them safe from COVID-19.
One of the hospital’s neonatologists and paediatricians, Dr Lizelle van Wyk, says doctors wear them when performing highly contagious airway procedures on critically ill patients.
“These masks are modified from normal snorkel masks that we use in tropical waters. They are modified by removing the snorkel and then adding an adapter and a breathing filter and these filters are then able to filter out the Covid virus and thereby protecting the healthcare worker from contracting Covid-19.”
Van Wyk, an avid diver, says a diving colleague showed the mask to her after Europe started adapting them.
