Got one word for you: prions. Standard sanitization procedures do not work with them, and if the hospital is not setup to decontaminate for prions, they're unlikely to be able to to it during the crisis.
see https://www.memphis.edu/ehs/pdfs/deconprions.pdf for what it takes.
All hospitals should have autoclaves, shouldn't they?
In terms of overall mass, sterilizing all those parts should be equivalent to throwing them away. It would require different internal procedures though, I don't think people are used to saving and reusing things. And it would be more labor intensive. And autoclaving might destroy the parts.
Most of which seem like reasonable tradeoffs in an emergency.
[0] Kuru is not something you want to research whilst eating, fyi. Hell, none of them are.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
One doctor can save numerous lives. Putting one out of commission is a huge blow in a crisis.
Maybe it's a labor/scale issue?
You just need to be careless once for it to be a problem. And considering how many sterile items you need to use every day - particularly in an emergency - it is not unlikely that one item went back into the reuse cycle without being sterilised. It's to avoid the question, 'was this item sterilised?' If its wrapper is open, assume it is used. You can only do that safely with single-use items.
How about putting the re-usable item in a wrapper so that the same rule can apply.
I have seen many different techniques for this kind of workflow.
You probably need to autoclave the parts, and then some more to be sure.
Simple boiling won't do much even for viruses
https://www.industrialspec.com/resources/plastics-sterilizat...
So I wonder if this table might have some significant errors in it? Maybe someone interchanged some plastics without intending to. It can't possibly be correct to put PTFE and PCL in the same category, can it?
Anyway, common plastics it rates as "Good" for autoclaving include acetal (Delrin), polypropylene, silicones, and (for some definitions of "common") PEEK.
Surprisingly polyimide (Kapton), the favorite high-temperature chemically-inert plastic of aerospace and electronics, isn't in the table at all.
I'm not surprised that some plastics may not be based on temperature only. For instance, nylon might crack if it's a thin piece due to thermal expansion. Or some may chemically react with steam.
I agree that it's weird that PCL would be okay while Teflon isn't, but it could be a molecular weight or thermal cycling thing. Teflon is very soft already so it might simply get deformed.
I'd trust such a table to point me in the right direction but find a second independent source if the answer seems weird.
Of course in practice you just try it and see if it survives and is functional. lots of plastics can survive a cycle or three but not five.
Things like needle drivers and forceps hold up fine with some care, but things with delicate moving parts are not supposed to be autoclaved. Plastics depend on the material--some are fine, some deform.
You can pasteurize eggs at ~135˚F and they're practically uncooked. The autoclave isn't like that at all--15-20 min at full temp/pressure plus the rampup/down times can do a number on things.
Why would this be trickier than having 1 clean valve, 0 dirty valves, and 2 patients?
"Just received word from an ICU doctor at a small NY hospital: They are officially out of ventilators and are now double venting patients with COVID (using the same ventilator for 2 infected patients)."
You would probably want to use a "high-level disinfectant" or "sterilant" instead. Gluteraldyhde is fairly common choice or ethylene oxide gas, though both can be fairly nasty if not handled carefully (which is, of course, the whole point).
The way alcohol swaps are used, they move contaminants away from the needle insertion site, and the alcohol helps to dislodge them. And, of course, it does kill some kinds of pathogen, as does soap.