A portable negative airflow box to control exposure for aerosol-generating procedures during coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) pandemic

To the Editor: SINCE the World Health Organization declared coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a pandemic,1 several articles have demonstrated the high risk of exposure to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 that healthcare personnel face when involved in aerosol-generating procedures. Bag-mask ventilation, tracheal intubation, and extubation represent risky procedures for anesthesiologists because of the exposure to a higher concentration of aerosols, possibly because of the greater viral load of this virus in the upper airway secretions.2 According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), controlling this type of risk requires implementing a hierarchy of controls that provides effective and feasible solutions to reduce hazards (eg, decreasing exposure to respiratory droplets and aerosols).3 Because elimination and substitution (the most effective NIOSH strategies) are not yet available, hospitals worldwide have shielded healthcare workers (HCWs) mainly by improving personal protective equipment (PPE)4; however, more effective containment measures. Such as administrative and engineering controls (ECs), surprisingly have been overlooked. This omission can be secondary to the difficulty of setting up negative-pressure rooms in due time, and at the Hospital Universitario San Ignacio (Bogota, Colombia) in affiliation with Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, we faced this difficulty, and therefore we aimed to redesign the original “aerosol box”5 into a negative-pressure microenvironment (Table 1 ) in an effort to produce an interim EC measure during the crisis.https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8937-0723https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3863-8993Revista Internacional - Indexad