Some medical procedures can put health care workers at higher risk for contracting COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases. With these high-risk procedures, it’s important that health care providers have access to personal protective equipment (PPE), including N95 masks. However, not all procedures that may seem high risk have that designation.
Vaginal delivery, for example, is not currently considered a high-risk or aerosol-generating procedure by the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As a result, N95 masks are not currently recommended for health care workers in all labor and delivery health care settings.
