Health
Nurses in Bangkok Handcrafted Tiny Face Masks for Newborns
When nurses at a Bangkok hospital found out that two mothers were taking their babies home using public transportation, they wanted to find a way to protect them from the coronavirus while traveling.
Healthcare Nurses in Bangkok are working to protect newborns from contracting the coronavirus even after their discharged from hospital.
When nurses at the Praram 9 Hospital in Bangkok learned that two mothers would be using public transportation to take their newborns home, they realized they needed to come up with an extra protective measure to guard the babies from being exposed to the coronavirus. They got to work and handcrafted two tiny face shields for the babies to wear while in transit.
The hospital shared images on Facebook of the protective equipment and emphasized that this was a unique situation and that newborns typically don’t wear face masks. If a family, for example, takes a baby home in their own vehicle, the newborn would not don the face shield.
Nurses shared on Facebook Newborns with Face Screens
“Because safety is what we care about the highest,” the hospital wrote in the Facebook post.
The Centers for Disease Control recommends that only children who are 2 and older wear face masks to safeguard against the coronavirus. Babies younger than that have a higher risk of suffocating while wearing a mask.
Babies are unlikely to develop the coronavirus while in utero, but they’re at risk contracting it just like anyone else once they’re born, according to the CDC. Children, in general, who get the coronavirus though, typically have mild symptoms or are asymptomatic.
In the largest study of children with the coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control analyzed 2,500 cases of coronavirus among children in the US who were 18 and younger.
Of 95 infected infants studied, 62% were hospitalized. The rate was 14%, at most, for those between the ages of 1 and 17. While rare, the US has seen a few cases of babies dying from the coronavirus. Last month, an infant in Illinois died from the disease and was the youngest person to succumb to the coronavirus in the US at that point.
“We must do everything we can to prevent the spread of this deadly virus,” Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said in a statement after the baby’s death. “If not to protect ourselves, but to protect those around us.”
