A new development ensuring an adequate supply of personal protective equipment, while helping the state’s ND Smart Restart plan.
Gov. Doug Burgum spoke about the Battelle Memorial Institute out of Ohio. It’s a non-profit research and development company doing mobilized decontamination systems for the U.S.
Burgum says we are the 26th state to receive one. The unit is already set up in Bismarck and it cleans N95 masks at no cost.
He says 23 workers will provide cleaning at no charge to all healthcare facilities in the state, including dentist offices and chiropractors, just to name a few.
It uses a bar code system making sure you get your own masks back.
“What’s going inside these containers is exciting because they are using concentrated vapor phase hydrogen peroxide, it’s been validated keeping it at a concentrated level for two and a half hours, decontaminates all biological contaminates, including the SARS-COVID-2 which is the virus that causes the COVID-19 illiness,” said Burgum.
He also said the turn around would be about five to evens days, with shipping, and it could enable more than three uses of those N95’s without degrading the filter performance.
The mobilized decontamination system can lean 10,000 masks per cycle, two cycles per day.
The Governor says this will help two of our eight criteria for our ND Smart Restart plan.