SALEM, Ore. — Oregon is getting several shots of good news as it battles the coronavirus pandemic.
Masks for medical workers have been in desperately short supply in Oregon, risking exposing not only them to the coronavirus but other patients. Now, the state is receiving millions more masks. An N95 mask disinfecting machine is also coming.
Also, a team at a Portland university has designed a ventilating machine to be made with 3D printers. And Walgreens is opening up a drive-thru testing site in a Portland suburb, one of its first in the nation.
The Battelle Decontamination System will be located in Eugene so that it can service several areas, said Tim Wollerman, a spokesman for Oregon’s pandemic response team. The system uses hydrogen peroxide to disinfect masks and can disinfect as many as 85,000 per day.
“It’s a real force multiplier when it comes to masks,” said Chris Ingersoll, spokesman for the Oregon Office of Emergency Management.
Battelle has deployed its mask decontamination systems to Ohio, New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut and Georgia.
Amid a global shortage of ventilators, a team from Oregon Health & Science University has come up with a low-cost version produced with 3D-printing technology, the university announced Friday.
“The goal is to provide it for free to whoever needs it,” said Albert Chi, an OHSU trauma surgeon who previously pioneered 3D-printed prosthetics for children and is leading the effort.
Depending on the printer, a single ventilator can be manufactured in three to eight hours and made operational with the addition of low-cost springs available at any hardware store. The low-tech ventilators require no electricity, only a working oxygen tank, and can be replicated for less than $10 of material, the university said.
Chi and his team filed on Friday for emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to deploy the design across the country. If approved, any hospital with access to a commercial-grade 3D printer would have the ability to produce a new ventilator within a matter of hours.
Walgreens has opened one of its first COVID-19 testing sites in Oregon — drive-thru testing in Hillsboro, Gov. Kate Brown announced.
“One step at a time, we are making progress towards the day when we can begin to reopen our communities and safely return to public life,” Brown said. She thanked Walgreens for selecting Oregon for one of its first rapid COVID-19 testing sites in the nation.
COVID-19 has claimed three more lives in Oregon, raising the state’s death toll to 86, the Oregon Health Authority reported. There were 51 new cases of COVID-19 reported, bringing the state’s counted total to 2,177.
