During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a research team went looking for and found a way to make standard surgical masks better at keeping out small airborne droplets that might contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a team at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center went looking for and found a way to make standard surgical masks better at keeping out small airborne droplets that might contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

They came up with an easily manufactured adhesive silicone harness that allows light surgical masks to match and sometimes exceed the federal safety standards for N95 and KN95 masks.

A study led by Jeannette Ingabire, a Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology graduate student in the Rice lab of electrical and computer engineer Jacob Robinson, appears in JAMA Network Open, part of the American Medical Association group of journals.

The team won a small grant in the first round of awards from Rice’s COVID-19 Research Fund to make surgical masks better suited to the crisis. «N95s were hard to get at the time, so it seemed logical to improve the flimsy surgical masks you see in hospitals,» Robinson said. «Now, of course, good masks are easier to get, but you never know when our solution will be needed.»

The project began when co-author Dr. Sahil Kapur, an assistant professor in the Department of Plastic Surgery at MD Anderson, approached Rice engineers with an idea for a harness to make surgical masks fit more snuggly around the face.

Story Source: Materials provided by Rice University. Original written by Mike Williams. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.