By Ma Jun

With the continuous expansion of the novel coronavirus epidemic in China, medical workers in some places are suffering shortages of protective gears. Worried by the situation, many netizens began to set sight on the NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suits used by chemical defense troops because they look very similar to the protective suits for medical workers. Anyway, is it possible to use the NBC suits as medical protective gears during this critical period?

An anonymous chemical defense expert said on February 2 that the NBC suit is a type of military personal protective equipment designed to provide protection against direct contact with and contamination by radioactive, biological or chemical substances. It is airtight and water-proof, and uses respirator to enable chemical defense personnel to breathe, so as to absolutely isolate the wearer from poisonous, toxic substances in nuclear, biological and chemical environments. In terms of isolating function, it’s definitely no problem to use the NBC suit as a substitution. But given the NBC suit’s extremely high protective level, that would be “overprotected” if we do so.

Nurses put on protective suits outside a ward in Beijing Ditan Hospital in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 3, 2020. The Beijing Ditan Hospital, a designated hospital to treat patients infected with the novel coronavirus in the city, has opened three general wards and one intensive care unity to treat infected patients in a bid to fight against the coronavirus outbreak. (Photo by Peng Ziyang/Xinhua)

There is also a kind of air-permeable NBC protective suit with lower-level isolation, which can isolate toxic droplets and steams, but not air and water vapor. Such suit is more comfortable to wear. However, it still lacks proof whether it can isolate the novel coronavirus, said the expert.

Some experts also argued that just as some people found wearing N95 masks with better protective functions made it harder to breathe than wearing common surgical masks, the higher protective level a NBC suit has, the less comfortable for its wearer it will be and the shorter usable time it will have. For instance, a NBC suit with a steel oxygen canister can only operate for 20 minutes, while the one with filter mask can work for more than 40 minutes despite its slightly lower protective level.

The experts believe that for those medical workers who need to continue working for hours in the wards, wearing NBC suits as protective gears would cause heavy physical exhaustion and thus reduce their work efficiency. In addition, the NBC suits are relatively expensive, which are often reused after decontamination. But in the process of decontamination, the virus on the chemical suits might be spread in the air. In this sense, their safety is even less than that of disposable medical protective suits.