US Customs and Border Protection said it will seize exports of N95 respirator masks, surgical masks, gloves and other key protective medical gear to allow the Federal Emergency Management Agency to determine whether the equipment should be kept in the US for the effort to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Drug Enforcement Administration announced it will raise production limits by 15% for certain narcotics used for treating COVID-19 patients, including the painkillers fentanyl, hydromorphone and morphine, and cough or cold medicine components like pseudoephedrine and ephedrine. The agency said the production allowance for methadone, used for treating opioid addiction, will also be increased to ensure opioid treatment programs have enough supplies.

The FDA has given emergency use authorization to InBios International for its Smart Detect SARS-CoV-2 rRT-PCR Kit, which can deliver results within four hours.

Three of four respirators were unsafe to use in MRI systems due to their strong attraction to magnets, resulting in total contact loss with a 3D-printed head and imaging interference, according to a study in Clinical Radiology. Researchers called for the use of World Health Organization-approved surgical masks for patients undergoing MRI and for radiologists to test respirators using a handheld magnet of more than 1,000 gauss as recommended by the ACR.

Medtronic and Foxconn, an electronics maker, are partnering to mass-produce ventilators at the latter's factory at the Wisconn Valley Science and Technology Park. The factory is expected to begin ventilator production in four to six weeks.

Under the Defense Production Act, the US government has contracted Royal Philips for $646.7 million to deliver 2,500 ventilators to the Strategic National Stockpile by the end of May and to deliver 43,000 ventilators by year's end.

A team from the University of Mississippi Medical Center has created the Robertson Ventilator, a low-cost ventilator made from adapters, valves, garden hose sections, a solenoid and a lamp timer. The device has been submitted to the FDA for emergency use authorization.

High-end gaming PC company Maingear will be producing an in-house-designed ventilator called the Maingear LIV to help New York City's intensive care units in the fight against the novel coronavirus.

BillionToOne is working on its qSanger-COVID-19 test, a quantitative COVID-19 assay based on Sanger sequencing that can increase the capacity of diagnostic tests for COVID-19 by hundreds of thousands per day and get around the issue regarding reagent supplies.

A Class I recall has been issued for Boston Scientific's Imager II 5F angiographic catheters because of the possibility of the catheter tip detaching during procedure preparation or a patient procedure.