Appropriate Protection Measures Against COVID-19 in Delivery Room

摘要

The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a global pandemic, accounting for more than 152 million infected cases up to 1 May 2021 worldwide. Public education provided by experts could minimize the level of communication and social contacts (1). Since the virus is transmitted from human to human, it is important to be alert and take precautionary measures to protect labor room staff, pregnant mothers, and their babies (2). The panic buying and overusing personnel protective equipment (PPE) hast caused the deficiency of N95 masks, surgical masks, and gloves in low-income countries and even high-income ones (3). Generally, appropriate prevention of virus transmission from/to healthcare workers and patients depends on the effective use of PPE such as gloves, face masks, air purifying respirators, goggles, face shields, respirator, and gowns (4). According to the risk of asymptomatic disease transmission, every unit shouldmake sure that all patients wear a surgicalmask and the healthcare staff use a new surgical mask or gloves for each patient (5, 6). However, due to the limited capacity of medical resources, executing this recommendation is a challenging issue (7).