Chinese hospital workers improvise protective gear

These pictures from one of the hospitals in Wuhan, the city at the center of the coronavirus outbreak, show medical workers resorting to wearing the plastic covers originally used to pack medical supplies because of a shortage of protective gear.

They have been provided to the Guardian by a doctor working at Wuhan union hospital.

The publication of the images come amid a row over emergency medical supplies not getting to the correct places.

Michael Standaert, who is reporting for the Guardian from China, earlier reported how the Red Cross Society of Hubei has come under fire from Chinese netizens who say the charity is sending high-quality medical grade N95 filtration masks to hospitals that are not at the centre of the outbreak nor fever clinics in the greatest need of masks.

The Red Cross subsequently released a statement saying their announcement was mislabelled and it should have said they were KN95 masks, not N95 masks, which is why those other hospitals got them and not the frontline treatment hospitals.

But a chief executive of a company that makes high-quality face masks in China cast doubt on the claim. “To me that sounds like quite the excuse,” he said.

“N95 and KN95 uses exactly the same standards. N95 is the CDC NIOSH standard, that’s the US standard. The Chinese standard – the guobiao standard – is called the KN95. In Europe, it is FFP2, it is 94% [filtration] but it is the same standard. All of those standards require the masks to be able to filter out a rate of 95% of particles at peak breath rate.”