Editor's Note Please participate in an important nationwide perioperative survey on surgical smoke evacuation. The purpose of the research, led by Brenda Ulmer MN, RN, CNOR, is to determine evacuation behaviors in hospitals before COVID-19, and then note changes as the virus continued to spread in the US. Ulmer and…

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Editor's Note Cloth masks are now prohibited at the Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, the December 30 Becker’s Hospital Review reports. The health system is requiring patients and visitors to wear surgical, N-95, or KN-95 masks and will provide them if needed. Experts have noted that single-layer cloth masks offer minimal…

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This issue of OR Manager draws on content presented at both the 2021 OR Business Management and OR Manager Conferences. After more than a year, the OR Manager community came together to network, learn, and share knowledge as well as celebrate each other’s efforts from such a challenging year. The…

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Part 1 of this two-part series discussed the splashes and the potential for exposure to pathogens that personnel face daily in sterile processing and endoscopy departments, as well as the current guidelines and strategies for reducing exposures (OR Manager, July 2021, pp 1, 9-11, 15). These risks were derived from…

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Editor's Note The George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, in Washington, DC, released a report on May 25 that summarizes findings from a national survey of frontline healthcare workers (HCWs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey of 1,200 HCWs from all 50 states and the District of…

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Editor's Note The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on May 13 announced that fully vaccinated individuals can discard masks and do away with social distancing outdoors and in most indoor settings. The agency still calls for wearing masks in crowded indoor settings, such as buses, planes, hospitals, prisons, and…

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Editor's Note The New York Times (NYT) reported on May 11 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) new guidelines for mask wearing are misleading because they treat outdoor transmission of COVID-19 as a major risk. The CDC reports that less than 10% of COVID-19 transmissions are occurring…

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Editor's Note This randomized, controlled trial by Danish researchers finds that wearing surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not significantly reduce the COVID-19 infection rate, compared with no mask. Of 6,024 trial participants, 3,030 were randomly assigned to wear high-quality surgical face masks with a filtration rate…

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Editor's Note This multicenter retrospective study led by researchers from George Washington University School of Medicine, Washington, DC, found that aspirin use by COVID-19 patients was associated with improved outcomes. Of 412 COVID-19 patients included in the study, 314 (76.3%) did not receive aspirin, and 98 (23.7%) received aspirin within…

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Editor's Note In a science brief based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) analysis of the latest available data, the agency says the risk of getting COVID-19 from surfaces “is generally considered to be low.” The CDC noted that: The risk of COVID-19 infection via surface transmission…

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