The Catalan government has ordered the removal of 200,000 FFP2 face masks, out of a total of 490,000 sent by the Spanish health ministry, due to doubts that they meet the criteria established by the regulations. "They need to be evaluated because it has been observed that they could be inadequate and may fail to meet the requirements for an FFP2 mask," explained Catalan health minister Alba Vergés.
The minister gave this explanation when asked in a press conference this Friday about a quantity of 100,000 medium-protection "Filtering Facepiece Particles" masks which the Spanish government had sent to the autonomous communities, and which the ministry had withdrawn after a Catalan hospital detected some that were faulty.
Vergés, however, spoke of double that amount - a total of 200,000 masks - which her government had decided to withdraw yesterday after it was detected that they might not have met the necessary requirements. The shipment managed by the Spanish government had been distributed among different centres.
Sources in the Catalan health service specified that the Madrid ministry had informed them that some masks were in poor condition but had not specified which batch it was, so the department has decided to remove them all "for prudence" and test them in order to check which, if any, were usable.
The defects with the masks, sourced from the Garry Galaxy company, were detected by the Hospital Parc Taulí in the Catalan city of Sabadell. On Wednesday, the Spanish health ministry then emailed the different autonomous governments to proceed to the "immediate removal of all the affected masks".