First of all, please make sure you've read the Ebola page. This is a tiny part of a bigger process: we look at needs, think of ideas, prototype them, document them, show them to external validators, refine them ... and finally we tell it like it is: you tie your own shoes with your own hands. Don't make anyone else responsible. You've been warned.
Hazmat suits are not highly practical:
- you need to learn how to use them
- you need a buddy to help you put it on and then, importantly, take it off
- it's hot in there
- can't work for too long
- they cost quite a bit
- they are not available in many places where protection would be needed
Maybe we could design something else. Maybe not better in an absolute sense, but useful for some of the tasks that need doing.
The following is just a provocation. You know: the kind of "bad idea that might lead to a better idea if we work on it".
We'd like to give the best care, together with the best protection. The kind of care you give to a baby. With the protection given by, well, an incubator. But let's reverse it, and call it an excubator:
- Simply, a box with gloves sticking out.
- Plus a window so we may see.
- Plus a marsupial bag so we may have syringes and stuff; maybe with a one-way slot like those used to let snail-mail in, with no easy way to take it out again. Someone suggested a slide on the outside, so that an assistant might give us that extra element we forgot to put in the bag.
- Plus handles inside, so we would get inside the box, grab the handles, and walk towards the patients' bed.
- Plus, surely, some kind of plastic "floor", with boots or some way to stick boots and have them go only in one direction.
It can't possibly work, can it? It's probably dangerous, if you think you're protected when in fact you're not. So it needs careful testing, just like you would test anything that might be dangerous.
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