The government of the Netherlands has recalled over half a million masks, 600,000, from its health facilities that were imported from China after discovering that they failed to meet quality standards.
The Dutch media has reported that the faulty masks failed to meet the safety requirements. Some hospitals had the masks tested on their own and found out that they were failing to stop coronavirus particles pass through and didn’t fit properly on the face. The filters on the mask were also found to be of poor quality.
The Dutch government, due to shortage, purchased 1.3-million KN95 quality face masks from China, similar to American N95 standard and European FFP2 standard that blocks around 95 percent of particulate matter in the air and is advised by WHO and American CDC to use while treating COVID-19 infected patient.
Chinese manufacturer delivered nearly half of the consignment consisting of 600,000 masks on March 21. The Ministry of Health distributed part of the shipment to the healthcare providers across the country and later received complaints claiming the masks to be faulty.
The masks have now been retrieved, says the ministry and that the distribution of rest of the masks was immediately put on hold. However, there is a possibility that doctors or other medical staff may have worn it while treating COVID-19 positive patients.
The Netherlands has reported a total of around 11,000 COVID-19 coronavirus infected patients and a death toll of over 750 at the time of writing.
This is not the first case, Chinese manufacturers have also delivered faulty medical supplies to Spain and the Czech Republic. Microbiology experts in Spain found that the China-made rapid coronavirus tests had only 30 percent sensitivity, meaning, out of all the tests only 30 percent of the tests correctly detected the virus.
The Czech Republic also claimed that 80 percent of the rapid tests received from China proved to be faulty.
As the world is seeing a rapid surge in a number of coronavirus cases worldwide and a lot of developing countries are short on medical supplies, Jack Ma, Alibaba Co-founder, announced free medical supplies to several countries including India.
The above claims put those countries at risk that have received medical supplies from China or are set to receive and India is on that list too as Indian Red Cross Society has already received the first batch of medical supplies from China’s Alibaba Foundation as a part of the donation.
