Gov. Ralph Northam announced on May 2 that Virginia was approved by FEMA to receive three Battelle Critical Care Decontamination Systems which can collectively sanitize 240,000 PPE each day.
The systems are at no cost to Virginia for the first six months of use, and their decontamination services are free to hospitals and healthcare workers.
The systems are being installed in the Marching Virginians Center on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, a warehouse in the Hampton Roads Sanitation District, and the Vietnam Veterans Pavilion at the Chesterfield County Fairgrounds near Richmond.
“This innovative new technology will extend the life of critical PPE like N95 masks, giving our medical facilities and first responders greater access to much-needed supplies and helping the Commonwealth manage our resources amid a nationwide shortage,” Northam said.
The newly installed decontamination systems could potentially decrease not only Virginia’s demand for PPE, but also West Virginia’s, as the system in Blacksburg is being shared with the state.
More systems are also being made available to Washington D.C., Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina.
The decontamination process is powered by concentrated vapor-phase hydrogen peroxide that the respirator masks are exposed to for 2.5 hours.
The process rids the masks of biological contaminants, including SARS-CoV-2, the contaminant that causes the new coronavirus, according to a press release from Battelle.
Battelle was awarded a $400 million contract by the Defense Logistics Agency on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and FEMA to provide healthcare workers free decontamination services for N95 respirator masks.
“The contract awarded to Battelle will allow us to staff additional systems to provide a continuous buffer against current and future N95 supply chain challenges,” said Matt Vaughan, Battelle’s Contract Research President.
The United States currently lacks adequate amounts of PPE and will need far more than are currently available to battle this crisis, according to The New England Journal of Medicine.
