Is the fit of N95 facial masks effected by disinfection? A study of heat and UV disinfection methods using the OSHA protocol fit test.

Amy DPhil Price; Yi Cui; Lei Liao; Wang Xiao; Xuanze Yu; Haotian Wang; Mervin Zhao; Qiqi Wang; Steven Chu; Larry F Chu

In the present study, the data analysis was conducted in two steps: descriptive statistical analyses and main hypothesis testing analyses. The descriptive statistical analyses computed the main outcome measures by treatment group. These analyses consisted of a series of univariate measures of central tendency computed to summarize continuous data using mean. Measures of dispersion were computed to understand the variability and were computed using standard deviation. The main analysis was tested using a series of hypotheses by univariate approach. Association between treatment method and overall fit factor was tested using a one-way ANOVA procedure (a=0.05). The final set of analyses used independent sample t-tests (a=0.05) to test the individual post-hoc associations between treatment types for significance, using the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure (false discovery rate of 0.25) to control for multiple comparisons. We report raw uncorrected p-values in this study and state a result is significant if the p < 0.05 after the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure. Statistical software SPSS for Mac 26.0 (Armonk, New York) was used to compute analysis for this study.