Some of the respirators delivered from China on Saturday do not fit properly and are only "40–80 percent effective," Health Minister Aurelijus Veryga said on Thursday evening.

“The supplier agreed to change the low quality respirators with a new batch,” said Veryga. The faulty ones will be used as simple facemasks in lower-risk environments, he said, adding that they were still produced from material of appropriate quality.

The Lithuaniana authorities decided to test the respirators before use after the Netherlands encountered similar problems with respirators from China.



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The ministry hasn’t yet provided information on how many respirators are faulty, but on Saturday at least 22,000 units were handed to hospitals in Lithuania’s second city, Kaunas.

Vytautas Grubliauskas, the mayor of Klaipėda, previously said that some of the masks are 95-percent effective.

“Although the fact remains that not everything arrives at the quality that was ordered and that was expected,” he said, adding that the goods will be changed and “the embassies of big countries are involved in the process”.