Case study into the successful emergency production and certification of a filtering facepiece respirator for Belgian hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic presented European hospitals with chronic shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as surgical masks and respirator masks. Demand outstripped the production capacity of certified European manufacturers of these devices. Hospitals perceived emergency local manufacturing of PPE as an approach to reduce dependence on foreign supply. The fact of a pandemic does not circumvent the hospital's responsibility to provide appropriate protective equipment to their staff, so the emergency production needed to result in devices that were certified by testing agencies. This paper is a case study of the emergency manufacturing of respirator masks during the first month of the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and is separated into two distinct phases. Phase A describes the three-panel folding facepiece respirator design, material sourcing, performance testing, and an analysis of the folding facepiece respirator assembly process. Phase B describes the redevelopment of individual steps in the assembly process.