This is a complexity issue. You can fashion a ventilator out of basically old vacuum cleaner parts. N95 masks are spun with what amounts to an extremely fancy cotton candy machine that spins the fibers together. The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality.
This kind of widespread attitude is a stunning reversal from the American exceptionalism of decades past. What do we call it, American fatalism? American incompetence?
In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really?
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality.
We're more than 6 months into the pandemic at this point and no sign of reaching the end. Under a different administration, the Defense Production Act would have been invoked immediately at the outset, onshore manufacturing capability of PPE would have been dramatically ramped up, and it would now already be paying dividends (more than 6 months later!) in the form of significantly increased onshore production of N95 masks and other PPE.
So yes, invoking the DPA absolutely would have changed the reality. The problem is that we didn't do it, not that doing it wouldn't have worked (it would have).
> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really?
Yes, because of a set of beliefs about market fundamentalism. The masks aren't as important as maintaining the existing product structure of society and proving that government intervention in healthcare can't work; if it shows signs of working, those paid to sabotage it will make sure it doesn't.
Besides, denialism is widespread. There were all sorts of conflicting pieces of information about the effectiveness of masks and various other quick-fix cures. The informational infrastructure is broken in fatal ways.
It became impossible for the US to ignore Japan once the ships started sinking at Pearl Harbor. The striking thing about today is that the huge casualties haven't turned into a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 event, despite outnumbering both of those put together by orders of magnitude.
The difference was then that the government did want to go to war already, and it was just public opinion that was shifted to pro-war by Pearl Harbour.
Likewise, Bush already wanted to go to war with Iraq, but 9/11 shifted public opinion to make it possible.
Surely 200,000 people dying is just as big of an event (or bigger) as Pearl Harbour or 9/11, it's just that the government are refusing to acknowledge it as such because it is not what they want and doesn't serve their purpose.
Yes, the US government is uniquely corrupt/evil/incompetent so let's just write them off. Not to worry, I'm sure Germany, UK, France, Russia, Taiwan, Italy, Norway, etc. have all ramped up capacity massively and our hospitals can just order from them. Right?
Germany was actually planning to give away masks for free to other countries as they seemingly ordered too much. And before they are aging past their best-used-by date in storage, better give them away.
Unfortunately not. And its not the free market or capitalism making countries react chaotically and incompetently.
Its democracy.
When the dear leader in the Forbidden City tells companies to shift production it will happen. When a president or prime minister wants to do anything he has to go through channels- including an army of lawyers.
This is what happens when the free market becomes the accepted cultural answer to all problems. We forget that the defining quality of good government is not efficiency, but effectiveness.
I don't think it's market fundamentalism, Trump is not a neoliberal. He just doesnt want to attempt to fix it. It could be racism, it could be his narcissism is such that if he tried to do something now he'd have to accept his failures from the very start, and that would shatter his fragile sense of self...
There is no market fundamentalism exhibited when it comes to other bailouts, only when it comes to trying to harm the least powerful in society.
> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really?
This is a somewhat ahistorical. The Defense Production Act of 1950 is what everyone is talking about. Withe respect to WWII, production increased every month of the war until the end, and the ramp up began in a limited fashion a year or two before the US entered the war.
The thing people miss is that a lot of what was produced by converted companies in the first year of the war was junk. The guns jammed, the planes fell out of the sky, and so on. Typewriter companies just don't know how to make rifles, and it took a lot of trial and error for them to figure it out. Literally they had to get back field reports on what broke and then try to reproduce and fix it, then put that fix into production. No amount of the government will it to be could make typewriter machinists immediately good at making rifles, even though those worker probably knew men who would depend on those same rifles.
Now consider that the weaving machines for n95 masks are probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than the lathes used to make rifles or the tools used to make a 1945 aircraft.
You're also forgetting that the first thing we tried to ramp up with a government nudge was ventilators, and numerous companies tried. Most of them failed however, and that experience isn't forgotten by other companies. Then it turned out that no one was paying attention to data from China and Italy that suggested that ventilators may actually be causing WORSE outcomes, but when doctors noticed the demand plummeted. Those manufacturers were now left holding the bag. Who want's to sign on for that?
Then, consider the PPE ramp up. A lot of companies participated, but cash strapped hospitals weren't buying because the moratorium on elective surgeries killed their cash flow, which no one had previously expected at a policy level. Sure the government could have stepped in, but again no one saw that coming before hand so extra funding for PPE for hospitals didn't get included in the Covid relief bill.
Now, after 2 big misfires the political will is spent.
I wholeheartedly agree that the current will to power approach taken by both parties in congress has rendered them useless. My overarching point however was that money ins't a magical crank you can turn that makes goods come into existence. The N95 problem is complicated, and not many companies could produce them even if they were funded.
They also don't want to get stuck with a factory floor full of mask machines after the pandemic is over.
Yep. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Actual exceptionalism ended coinciding with the end of WW2. It's America's slow and steady decline like Rome. 250 years / 10 generations is about all a civilization typically lasts. Apathy, corruption, incompetence, disorder, inequality, poverty, decay, tyrants, and ultimately: dissolution.
Here's an insightful prognostication by the late, great Chalmers Johnson around 2005: https://youtu.be/Q2CCs-x9q9U
Personally, I think it's healthy that America drops this exceptionalism attitude. We can't keep living off of the WW2 laurels forever. And other nations are clearly approaching our "world's best" status in various sectors: China builds a shitload of stuff, Canada has pandemic payment support and healthcare. We're very clearly not united against something like fascism and we're more fragmented, so yeah, we kinda can't do the WW2 things any more.
American exceptionalism isn’t just “we’re the best”, it’s also our (historical) optimism that we can solve any problem and that tomorrow will be better than today. There’s a baby in that bath water.
When I say American exceptionalism, I'm not talking about the attitude of "We're better than all other countries". I'm talking about the attitude of "We can accomplish whatever we set our minds to, no matter how hard the task". The same attitude was at play in the Apollo program, if we don't want to use a wartime analogy.
The problem is that while having a can't do rather than a can do attitude is "only" causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans right now, it is going to kill way more than that with our long-term ongoing failure to address climate change. That is where the costs of having a can't do attitude are going to be the most visible.
This is extremely frustrating. Every time I try to discuss big issues with my dad, his side consists basically of "its too difficult". This man witnessed the transition room sized memory to 1TB SD cards, the growth of the internet infrastructure, the development of international flight - all things which would have been considered magical miracles just a few decades before he was born, but now everything is just too difficult to bother implementing. I don't understand how he can have that attitude after everything he witnessed being built and even participated in building.
> Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really?
Your "can't" is playing two parts here trying desperately to imply "unable" for dramatic effect but actually means "unwilling" which I think is super misleading.
Like of course we could have, but politicians were more afraid of headlines like "The government invoked DPA and spent billions to produce masks, now they're sitting in warehouses" and "N95 mask producers cash huge government checks to produce masks no one needs."
The actual politicians charged with making decisions have been (I think naively) optimistic about the pandemic and if that isn't us going back to our British roots of going to the pub and waiting for it all to blow over I don't know what is.
> This kind of widespread attitude is a stunning reversal from the American exceptionalism of decades past. What do we call it, American fatalism? American incompetence?
> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really?
The really stunning thing here is that ~400,000 US troops died over a 4 year period in WWII. We've lost >200,000 US citizens in ~8 months due to COVID-19. I think American incompetence barely starts to cover this clusterf.
> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism.
Its a big gap in my experience of economics/politics/management about how things were done back then to do this. Was it people doing the "right thing", or were companies paid to do it, or was it government controlled factories.
Its a bit like the British empire - ie we need to invade Malaysia to get rubber, or Arabia for oil. How were things done in the old days? In today's globalized commercial world I (or most other managers) dont really know.
It’s been a while but I read Edwin Land’s biography — he was the inventor of Polaroid and considered the Steve Jobs of the mid-twentieth century — and the War effort was given a lot of credit for establishing their dominance. It didn’t seem like that in the short term, but after the War ended, if I recall correctly, they benefited greatly from having scaled up to meet its demands, and from incentives.
> We're more than 6 months into the pandemic at this point, and no sign of reaching the end
The pandemic was a looming threat in January, but we'll give a one month pass due to bureaucratic slowness. If machine production had been started in February, we'd currently have two months of full scale mask production. Right in time for flu season.
What would the dividends be here? The article says "shortage", but it's my understanding that health workers are now getting all the PPE they need to stay safe; we're just not quite up to the normal level of abundance where it's disposable. If you sent me 6 months into the past with $10 billion to allocate, I'd surely spend it on vaccine funding.
I wonder if maybe one of the differences is this has always seemed "temporary"... Or at least that is how it has been portrayed. We're just in that period before we have a vaccine, and everything goes back to normal. When you think we're only a few months away, making huge investments like that doesn't seem to make sense.
But WW2 was an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the war will come over here and our country will be destroyed.
A global pandemic is an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the disease will take over here and our country will be destroyed.
I live in New York, I can say for NYC took this seriously (eventually) and it still looks like someone Thanos-snapped half the economic activity in the city.
Now imagine if the city had kept on its initial path by not taking the virus seriously and leaving hospitals so full they couldn't even handle the dead bodies anymore?
What you are suggesting IS happening. Companies ARE investing in increasing American production of n95 masks in America. This was even reported by the wall street journal.
There are signs we are reaching the end of this pandemic. We've made a lot of progress. We are protecting nursing homes better. In most states death rates at the lowest they've been. NYC has shown that immunity is causing the virus to slow down. Hospitals have better treatments available to them. A vaccine is likely to be available by the end of the year and the systems are in place for fast administering to needed populations. Schools are back in session with minimal issues.
Your WW2 comparison would be tedious to even discuss. But in short, the economy did not switch overnight. And retooling and expanding is always easier than creating new production from nothing. Creating n95 masks isn't just an issue of "retooling".
We do not know if invoking DPA would have changed anything and this unsupported smug certainty is what ruins actuals discussion on this. You do not have any compelling reasons for HOW the DPA would have changed things.
Corporate greed is at all time high I’m afraid. 0.1% may be all the companies that have an altruistic bone in their body in the US right now. Everything is tied to bigger and better profits because God forbid your stock falter even the tiniest bit in this era. Your CEO salary tied to its performance might go down!
It's literally harder to produce N95 masks then to churn out rifles and ammo.
Want to produce a rifle (in the 1940s)? Milling machines and operators. That's a factory order, done. Ammo? Couple four stage presses and some armorers, not even hard to train civilians instead.
Want to produce N95 masks? Ok, well there's a custom built machine that produces the correct kind of fabric, there are only two builders in the world, and the machine has a meaningfully high failure rate... and requires special shipping, assembly, maintenance and so on...
You’re right, we’ve never produced cutting edge machinery en masse for a war before, this situation is completely new...
Wait, that’s not right.
That’s also ignoring scale. Getting a few machinists for rifles is pretty easy; getting all the machinists for total war is not. Comparative to the scale of government action and organization in WW2, manufacturing and distributing PPE is nothing.
A lot of people know how to build or operate a mill well enough to do most tasks. My dad does, my grandfather did, most of my uncles do.
The particular fabric machine for N95 masks is very specialized, and building those machines has a failure rate - you may be producing fabric only sufficient for a N90 or N85 application - a lot of "dust" or "atv" masks are exactly that.
The machines are physically large enough and with specialized enough parts you can't build one out of a machine shop.
It'd be like demanding we mass produce Titan IVs tomorrow. America has built a Titan IV before, we've built a few - surely we could just crank out one a day right?
I’m not saying that making the basic machinery for PPE is easy compared to say, simple firearms. They’re obviously more complex. But they’re also a known problem; we’ve been making PPE out of the same basic materials since 1972. Compared to other large scale efforts the US has undergone to fight wars or handle other national pride situations, making more PPE machines is both cheaper and simpler. It does not require the creation of new technologies, nor the whole sale mobilization and re-organization of our society. All it requires is the application of enough money to buy an F-35 or two to rebuild the machines that were dismantled back in 2000.
This is not complicated, we just lack the will as a society to fix this.
What is your hypothesis on why the UK, France, Germany, Norway, etc. have not just dictated new capacity into existence? If they could do that, then even if the US was uniquely sucking wind, we could just buy from them. We can't.
Of course there are difficulties. Everything is difficult compared to just buying stuff from China. The entire point is that we used to tackle the difficulties and work hard to succeed, rather than simply give up and recite reasons why things cannot be done.
Sorry, but this just isn't true. It was far more difficult to manufacture an M1 Garand in 1940 than it is an N95 mask in 2020. There was a huge amount of custom Pratt & Whitney machinery built just to produce the rifle, some of which is still used today to produce other things btw!
I have a small lathe and mill sitting in my office right now. With those, I have everything technically necessary to build a Garand. Don't get me wrong - it would take a long time, and I would have to make substantial improvements to my tooling - I'd need to build a button rifling machine, for instance - but I have everything necessary to bootstrap production of M1 Garands in my office.
No amount of time or hacking would let me produce the fabric necessary for disposable N95 masks. I'm quite confident of this - I worked on the issue for quite a while, as I was unemployed at the beginning of this pandemic. The best solution I found was making filter cartridges for existing reusable respirators from HEPA furnace filters and 3D printed parts.
You can make a M1 Garand, maybe, assuming that you don’t get the heat treat wrong and it wears out or blows up. What you are nowhere close to doing is manufacturing the 5.5 million M1 Garands that were ultimately produced. Nor any of the other firearms used, nor the literal mountains of ammunition required to train and equip all of the men who would eventually carry just that one rifle into combat.
The US effort for WW2 consumed damn near the entire manufacturing capability of the United States, required that civilians ration almost all consumer goods to make the war possible, created record breaking debt, and involved the mass training of heretofore economically excluded demographic groups in order to keep it going. Individual sub components of that war effort might have been “simple”, but at scale they are not simple at all. Comparatively the effort it would take to spin up half a dozen factories to produce PPE doesn’t come anywhere close to the mass efforts this country has sustained within living memory.
> What you are nowhere close to doing is manufacturing the 5.5 million M1 Garands that were ultimately produced.
Correct - reasonably, I could produce one in about six months of work with subsequent ones coming faster after having built up the tooling and knowledge. My point is that there are millions of people like me and that the tools required to do that are common.
More to the point I could produce a working, reasonably polished firearm in a couple of weeks or less if I were doing so full time and were not restricted by US federal law. If I were basing my design off of something like a Sten submachinegun, now we're talking days at most and rapidly ramping up production speed after that.
There are no alternate designs for N95 masks that will meet the needs of healthcare workers. There are no alternate materials that are "good enough" for expedient use. This is not a product that can be reasonably manufactured in a distributed fashion.
The question is not “who is capable of doing this”. The question is “what percentage of society’s resources must be focused on this task in order to fix it”. It’s kind of obvious that there’s a difference between making a firearm and a n95 mask, but that was never my point.
Yes, making an M1 Garand is simpler than making PPE. But the process of training tens of thousands of machinists, many of whom had never had an industrial job before in their lives, in order to make millions of firearms in a short order is a huge undertaking that literally changed the entire fabric of American society. And that is only one tiny sub portion of a gargantuan effort that saw entire industrial centers dismantled in order to feed the war effort. As another example, the Swiss are only “famous” for watches because American watch factories were dismantled in order to make bomber components, giving the neutral Swiss an opportunity to take over from what had historically been an American lead industry.
The level of societal change that WW2 created was so massive that there are literally country bars in Chicago to serve the former residents of Appalachian states who were moved around due to the war and decided to not return to their original states; just the industrial aspect of that war deeply changed who we were as a society, and affected everything.
Compared to the gargantuan effort required to do all of that, creating a few factories required to make PPE on shore is nothing. All that needs to be done is rebuild a few factories to recreate a product that until 2000 or so was almost entirely made in the US. Yes, it’s more complicated than making a small number of firearms, but in the scope of resources that America has poured into other problems, recreating a factory or two doesn’t even register on the scale.
Also, whatever happened to American optimism? This is not a hard problem to solve. We invented the damn N95 mask in the first place, why is everyone so down on our ability to redo something that we did without even thinking about 20 years ago. This is not a problem of capability, this is a problem of public will.
We're obviously "speaking different languages" here :).
I don't disagree at all with what you're saying about the scale and nature of wartime production. I get it, and we're totally on the same page there.
> creating a few factories required to make PPE on shore is nothing
Creating the factories is straightforward, as is hiring and training the workers. Expensive, sure, but that's not the problem. The problem is that there is a single material used in N95 masks for which we have limited sources and for which expanding the manufacturing capacity is very slow.
> Even established companies are having trouble boosting production because they can't simply buy more machines, according to Dave Rousse, president of INDA, the Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry.
> "There are only five or six companies across the globe that make these machines, and they're not inexpensive. These are sizable machines, a lot of technology, a lot of air handling, a lot of electronics, a lot of precision moving parts," Rousse said. "Normally it's nine to 12 months before you could get a machine delivery."
My understanding is that even if you can obtain the tooling, they're very difficult to keep operating - there are lots of variables to tweak and every batch has to be independently tested to verify that they meet the filtration standards. If they don't, that material ends up being used as "dust masks" and such. I would expect that means that training machine operators would be both time-consuming and expensive as well.
The bottom line of my point here is that the problem we're facing isn't one of resource allocation or of commitment to a goal - it's the tooling required to scale production significantly is slow to produce, and we don't know how to make it faster. The problem that needs to be solved isn't mask design, it's improving the production and testing equipment necessary to make the filtration media.
It’s not like the machines to make the base materials for PPE are magical items brought down from olympus to be used but never recreated. Literally everything I’ve said applies to those machines too. We could use the DPA to create more of those machines, but we’ve decided not to. The issue isn’t that any step of the chain is insurmountable, the issue is that we’ve decided as a country to just ... not bother.
You won't be able to produce materials neither for M1 Garand nor for masks. But at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance if any of the commonly used ones isn't available and complicated stuff is only testing filtration properties of the material with cheap test equipment (you can even make test equipment yourself, it's relatively simple for such purposes, "dust sensor" kind of stuff). Everything else is way more primitive than lathe and mill.
> at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance
Can you name any? That would literally be world changing right now.
As far as my research has revealed it is literally only melt-blown fabric that can meet N95 standards and the vast, vast majority of melt-blown fabric does not (we use tons of the stuff in sofas and mattresses but that stuff isn't anywhere near N95).
And no, your dust sensor will not meet lab requirements for N95 testing unless it had a very large price tag.
What is your hypothesis on why the UK, Germany, France, Norway, Russia, China, etc. have all been relatively unable to dictate sufficient capacity into existence? Even if the US is uniquely sucking, why can't we just buy it from all these other countries which should hypothetically have been able to create production also?
They have been able to, and Chinese respirator masks in particular are abundantly available in the US. But they use different industrial standards, so the Chinese masks are KN95s, and some health organizations don't want to use them.
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality.
Government certainly can change this reality (perhaps via the defense production act) by agreeing to buy masks off the line for a time after the immediate demand has been met. Or whatever.
None of this stuff - for example, defense contractors being managed by the government and permitted to make a reasonable but not excessive profit during wartime, or the early and middle stages of the cold war - is even especially complicated. It's an ideological prohibition against the government managing a company's profits in a specific area, and of course globalization of the relevant corporations, that prevents us from doing it. I'm not sure about the globalization part - I expect 3M and other conglomerates would be happy to work things out if they were dealing with people in the federal government who were even approaching sane, trustworthy and intelligent.
In WWII we tooled up to make tanks, ships, and planes in less time than we've now failed to tool up just to make masks. Which, needless to say, are less complex than tanks, ships, and planes, and our level of manufacturing technology is now much higher too.
Making rifles involves literal tons of highly specialized tool machines that are only used for making rifles. Just look at a barrel or action and try to figure out how these were machined accurately in the 1920s.
The government could also simply pay for the whole deal, from the design of production facilities to their eventual removal, and tack on a nice profit for the vendor. That's called "cost plus" and with the appropriate performance bonuses, other incentives, and some redundancy would probably solve.
We've demonstrated this repeatedly with military spending and NASA contracts. It doesn't always go well but if made sufficiently lucrative and performance-based (think wartime footing), with appropriate oversight, it certainly can get results.
We just don't have leadership at the moment, it seems, that has the intellectual capacity to consider these levers and pull them.
DoD spent a large chunk of their COVID money on weapon system components, not on pandemic response stuffs (stockpiling materials like masks or investing into vaccine research). So they could do it, and they should have done it (or obligated the money to it), they chose to ignore their directive.
> Government certainly can change this reality (perhaps via the defense production act) by agreeing to buy masks off the line for a time after the immediate demand has been met. Or whatever.
Of course, but it seems the vaccines had priority, to the point of ignoring masks:
August 8, 2020: "Federal spending on COVID-19 vaccine candidates tops $9 billion, spread among 7 companies"
To compare, the OP article writes:
"Why is the world’s richest country still struggling to meet the demand for an item that once cost around $1 apiece?"
The sad aspect is, if it turns out that even vaccinated people can spread the virus (as in: "they can still become infected and only get less sick"), and that is estimated as very probable by the experts at the moment, the existence of other vaccinated people will not protect the high risk groups -- the so-called "herd" will never protect them, only the vaccine, and only if it works for them. Which they won't know in advance:
The experts also don't expect too high protection of the vaccine, as it is known that vulnerable are only some percentages protected by the similar vaccines (sometimes even less than 50%). So the masks can turn out to remain more important than we hope at the moment: then, the estimated protection if both the infected and the vulnerable wear a good mask could be higher in many circumstances than a vaccine. That was the sound basis for this claim:
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality.
Allowing mask manufacturers to charge the market price for their masks, though, might have made it worthwhile to build out the necessary capacity (I am pretty sure that it would have, but I could be wrong, so I will hedge my bets). But then, grandstanding politicians would have claimed it was 'price-gouging' (which simply cannot exist) and might even have tried to send the mask-makers to jail. Who would take that risk?
The Washington Post actually had an article about this back in March or so.
The issue that you have is that there is a decently large capital cost to building new production, and once the pandemic is over, the budget hawks are going to swoop in and cut purchasing of masks down to below pre-pandemic levels because there's now a massive unused pile of the stuff, why do we need any more? So the guaranteed-purchase contracts are abrogated, and the manufacturers are saddled with a lot of debt and no prospective income.
(This isn't a theoretical thought exercise, it actually happened during the H1N1 flu crisis).
While the government absolutely should have fixed the incentives, I am a little puzzled why a huge private equity firm or a Bill-Gates-like figure didn’t fund more N95 machines when the government failed to. (Or at least, I haven’t heard that anyone has.) $25-100M for machines to help get the whole economy back on track seems like an obvious move on both economic and humanitarian grounds.
I'm confident that the very tiny number of people with the expertise to build/maintain these melt-blown fabric machines is extremely busy right now. This is very different than building a tank where most of the parts can be built in basically any machine shop.
Typical machine shops do not have the capabilities to make composite armor, gas turbine engine components, aluminium oxynitride vision blocks, night vision equipment, thermal IR sensors, encrypted radios, targeting computers, MEMS/laser ring gyroscopes, high precision servos, or range finders. Without these parts, you have a target rather than a tank.
All modern production has bottlenecks. For items that governments consider important, they find ways to manage bottlenecks.
The issue with US N95 availability is that no one in authority considers the problem important enough to be worth fixing.
"The free market will fix it!" - If we're assuming invoking the Defence Production Act wouldn't work because the machines are too complex to prepare in time, why on earth do you believe the free market would succeed?
Why are other countries with comparatively less free markets and more regulations not experiencing this problem in a greater degree? Shouldn’t we be doing better if it’s really as simple as less government = better outcome?
So the reason we don't have masks is because the "Free Market" was constrained by the government? You do understand that increasing the price of masks will restrict their availability right, which to some hospitals will be as good as having no masks at all right?
Increasing prices does restrict availability now, but as a step on a path to increasing availability in the future (because the higher prices incentivize eventual capacity-building, which lowers prices and increases quantities).
Keeping prices low restricts availability now and in the foreseeable future.
They're not going to respond to a short-term increase in prices--in any market, not just pandemic-related PPE--by increasing long-term production capacity. They know that demand will eventually drop before they can pay off their capacity investments.
Indeed, in the absence of price controls, cutting production in the face of increased short-term demand can increase profits by raising prices.
There's a reason the oil industry routinely shuts down refineries, pipelines, and other infrastructure for 'scheduled maintenance' during long weekends, after all.
As the parent said, a rising price will more efficiently allocate a scarce resource and ensure that people only purchase what is actually needed. Additionally, this will signal the market to produce more. A large hospital conglomerate could sign a deal with an upstart manufacturing firm to get the masks from the newly formed line. They could strike a deal that reduces risk for each party. It's unlikely the Hospital will never need these in the future, so it's not like they're throwing money away.
The people who need it most are healthcare workers. Given the cost of healthcare in America, I don't see how hospitals couldn't afford more expensive masks.
Hospitals are literally going out of business right now because they can’t do the things that make money (elective procedures) and are instead doing low pay/high risk pandemic work.
Here's what the two options are in reality. If you need a mask, you can hope that:
1) The central planning authority sees you and allocates you some
2) Anyone with some $ sees you and allocates you some
The study of economics tells us that #2 will tend to more successfully allocate the resources where they are needed. The confidence level is near that of how biologists talk about evolution.
#2 does suffer from "but rich people will protect themselves first." Of course, just as with #1 politically connected people will protect themselves first, and their wealthy benefactors.
Faced with a similar shortage of masks early in the year, the Korean government bought up the overwhelming majority of it's domestic mask production, and directed pharmacies to distribute them to the public at a fixed price according to a rationing system. As a result, every Korean has access to two N95-equivalent masks a week and the vast majority of Koreans wear them in public.
In Libertopia^wAmerica, the free market solution has trickled down unrated fabric masks to the general public and trickled up N95 masks according to the whims of Trumpworld.
In part due to universal masking with high-quality PPE, the South Korean death toll is 7 per million. In Galt's Gulch^w^wAmerica, the death toll is 597 per million.[0]
Government can work for the majority of people. The American free market does not.
Sounds like the smart solutions is to cut out this nebulous middle-man that must be motivated by ambiguous signals that we aren't actually sure will work, and instead just produce the masks directly. That is to say, seems like we could have avoided this mess by the state itself producing the necessary PPE.
EDIT: If you disagree, tell me why. "Capitalists" and "communists" both are getting downvoted in this thread for what I assume are ideological reasons and it's annoying me.
I think the issue is that the 'nebulous middle-men' actually provide value: they each make decisions based on ambiguous signals, resulting on the whole in better overall decision-making than a central production authority. As an example, a nation mask-making concern doesn't really know how many masks to make. It doesn't really have an accurate count of health-care interactions per day, so it doesn't know how many masks to make in order to provide one per professional-patient interaction. Given the relative political costs to central decisionmakers of a shortage versus a surplus, they will tend to overproduce. This is a kind of socialising costs while privatising profits: society pays for the overproduction both in terms of cost-to-produce and opportunity costs for other items (How many servings of formula for abandoned children is a mask worth? How many prison guards is a mask worth?); meanwhile, the individual decisionmakers enjoy increased social status for insuring supply.
There simply isn't enough information to make good enough decisions centrally. There is waste associated with decentralisation, too (each of those middlemen gets his cut!), but it turns out that there is less waste and more wealth with a free market than with a centralised one.
The market price is still too volatile to make such decisions. This is the problem that options trading solves, but we don't have an options market for N95 masks.
Even if we did, there would be tons of complaints about speculators turning a profit on people's health.
> 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand
Until the next pandemic. We can spend hundreds of billions on national defense, but N95 mask machines for protection in a pandemic is where we draw the line?
> Until the next pandemic. We can spend hundreds of billions on national defense, but N95 mask machines for protection in a pandemic is where we draw the line?
Or we could allocate money to PPE and instead spend it on defense:
"Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor"
Even the term "defense" is so misused. I'd consider N95 masks a sort of defense, just as much as tanks and battleships. Masks are not a boondoggle for a possible future war, they are the defense for our current one (against COVID)
I read it differently. "Congress, knowing they have almost zero control over defense expenditures, are aghast to find out the DoD spent money how the DoD sees fit, rather than what Congress hoped they would spend the money on."
This is just like the bailout money. No meaningful way to control how it's spent, that's why AIG all got golden parachutes. It's a body of dumb people making decisions in haste at best, or entirely corrupt (my vote).
>> 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand
It's September. We (the informed public) knew that the pandemic was likely going to be a major problem at this time in February, which is 7 months ago. The government probably knew a month before that.
We've already had a lot more than 6 months. And I really suspect it could be done faster in an emergency situation where you can pay all the workers overtime.
“The government” isn’t a person. It can’t know things. It’s a complex, chaotic system of various people with competing interests who know things at different times and have power over different things.
Also, based on our leadership (and the likely reelection of that leadership) and how many Americans are refusing to follow basic sensible health guidance, this pandemic is going to go on for at least another year, maybe multiple years. It makes sense to start now if the payout is 6 months later.
Amortization on these facilities is not 6 months. It's years, likely a decade or more. There's only two companies in the whole world with the expertise to make these machines. And the machines have a high failure rate. Every nation on the planet is demanding more capacity. Do you believe that the very tiny number of people who are capable of expanding production capacity are just sitting on their laurels? This is categorically different than building something like a tank where most of the parts can be built in any machine shop.
You have to assume that every country on the planet, not just the US, has the same problem you're ascribing to the US. That they could just order new production capacity into existence, but they are choosing not to.
In the 102 years since the 1918 Influenza pandemic, there has been World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Iraqi Storm, Afghanistan, and Iraq War 2.
I'd say by pragmatic measures, we're more likely to use our guns than to come across a pandemic like what we're seeing today.
And yeah, we had pandemic scares: H1N1 (aka: Spanish Flu part 2), The 1960s flu, Ebola. But none of them them really were an issue to this degree.
N95 masks don't seem to help vs HIV or MRSA, so I'm not quite sure why you're mentioning them. If you're worried about an HIV outbreak, it seems like we have enough condoms to protect against that.
I think my general point is that our N95 mask production is enough, so long as we save masks and replenish the stockpile. Given the hundred years of pandemics, this COVID19 one is the worst since the 1918 flu by pretty much all measures. Its your canonical black-swan event.
> Perhaps we use the guns more because we have them available.
Did we run out of masks during H1N1, Avian Flu, Ebola, SARS, or any other pandemic before COVID19 ?
Its been years since those examples, so maybe I don't remember exactly. H1N1 was a big deal, but it wasn't "hospitals ran out of equipment" big deal from my memory.
We didn't run out of masks during H1N1 because we had a decent stockpile. We never replenished that stockpile. From the article:
> the H1N1 flu epidemic depleted 85 million N95s from the national stockpile — and the supply was never replenished. In 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017, public health officials published alarming reports warning of a “massive gap” in what remained.
COVID-19 is not a black swan.
> “The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.”
The mask shortage isn't even a black swan, it was both predictable and predicted.
> The trade group for manufacturers of personal protective equipment in mid-2009 urged “immediate action” to restock N95 masks. The International Safety Equipment Association warned of “significant shortages” if another pandemic caused demand for masks to surge.
> A nonprofit representing public health agencies, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), echoed industry’s appeal in a 2010 report funded by the federal government, recommending the repository of masks be “replenished for future events.”
> Did we run out of masks during H1N1, Avian Flu, Ebola, SARS, or any other pandemic before COVID19 ?
Yes.
Every single year when the wildfires torch California N95 masks become unobtainable for a couple of weeks. Having a larger supply and/or back stock available would make a difference. It's clear that planning is needed, but production also needs to increase to allow for stockpiling.
You also talk about a "black-swan event" for something that was foreseeable and somewhat predictable. Just like flooding and earthquakes, pandemics come in cycles and we were due for one any time. It also means it'll happen again, so maybe we should be ready.
Basically no willingness to commit to buying enough volume for it to make sense for production to ramp up.
Slap a massive tariff on any medical equipment from China and you'll get local producers that can meet the demand. Without it who is willing to chance bankruptcy for a short term "possible" boost in sales.
Just Devil's Advocate, but what's to stop those companies from outsourcing their manufacturing to Indonesia or South Korea instead? And if you tariff those two, what's to stop them from outsourcing to Malaysia or Brazil? And on and on.
On items like PPE, where you can sell large amounts of those anywhere in the world, manufacturers will always game to match cost of manufacture to market price. So if it's known that Indonesia and Kenya are definitely going to be buying crazy amounts of your product if the price per unit matches their economic reality, someone's always going to try to meet that demand. Millions and millions of pennies is still a lot of money. Plus you can sell the same PPE you manufactured at low cost into the EU and US.
It's just too profitable.
I suppose you could slap a tariff on PPE from anywhere other than the US? That would probably work.
I think we are going to have to do this in all western countries. Healthcare equipment is just too critical to leave to the corporate accountants to profit maximise.
The DPA is designed to exactly fix this problem: provide guaranteed price and guaranteed quantity contracts to ensure that manufacturers can always justifiably tool up and produce what's needed.
The government takes on the risk that it might not be needed.
Of course seeing as how it's a paper mask with a near indefinite shelf-life given proper storage and the US should be maintaining a proper stockpile anyway, that's not much risk.
I don't understand why one needs the DPA for this. Just issue a PO for a suitable value so that a vendor decides it is worth it economically. Attach the delivery schedule that is desired. If it isn't possible or it is a bad economic move for the company, then the DPA isn't going to work out well anyways. This is operations 101.
They tried to do something like this with Kodak, but the crooks at Kodak screwed it up.
The benefit isn't just applying it directly to the mask maker, it's also applying it recursively to everyone that does things the mask producer needs.
The mask producer needs a second production line, but the land they need isn't for sale? Boom, now it is.
The mask producer can't meet parking minimums for their new line, or haven't completed an environmental impact assessment? Start building, we'll take care of it.
The mask producer needs a load of elastic, but their elastic supplier is busy making sunglasses holders for a car maker? No problem, go ahead and jump the queue.
Mask factory workers can't get to work, because the busses aren't running, because it's not economic to run them? They are now.
Needless to say, with modern international supply chains this might be less useful than it has been in the past - no way to jump a queue using the DPA if your supplier isn't under its jurisdiction.
Rather than wrecking havoc by taking people's land and forcing changes to their production plans, how about just paying the true costs of those changes and everyone doing it because it is in their best interests? How much has the government spent on this virus to date? 3T? It would not be hard to pay the market rate required to make this happen. That is how EVERY other program, defense and space included, have worked for decades.
This is a sad comment, but indicative of where America is today.
Past generations put men on the moon with less compute power than an iphone. Manhattan project, WW2, space program, interstate highway system, etc. This country has done great things (operative word being done).
Our generation doesn't want to produce its own health care products because it may not be cost effective. What a lack of ambition.
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand.
When does the USA plan to replenish its stockpile of 100M masks?
I would assume that demand will remain high until our stockpiles are replenished, which will be months (maybe years) after COVID19.
If this fact isn't clear, then our leaders should make it clear by passing a law ensuring the purchasing of N95 masks until the 100M stockpile is replenished.
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality.
Isn't this the point of the DPA? The government promises private industry that they will buy a certain amount of product to make it worth industry's while to increase production as though the crisis (and thus demand) were going to last more than 6 months? And I get that the machinery takes 6 months to assemble, but that's because everything was designed for a world where the demand for masks didn't rise or fall so dramatically; however, if we could build an atomic bomb in short order, surely we could figure out how to expedite the construction of fancy cotton candy machines in 2020?
No amount of invoking the DPA would change this reality today, but if it had been invoked six months ago it would have us in a much better place now.
The entire point of the DPA is to encourage and finance manufacturing of items that are strategically important but not massively profitable, partially by funding the investments required to make the initial machinery.
As others have pointed out, while N95 is best it seems to be posssible to substantially reduce transmission with masks of other materials. The earlier SARS countries of Thailand and Vietnam have responded very effectively to the pandemic, and I don't think they have a magic N95 supply.
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality.
I'm surprised no one in the comments so far has challenged that these machines actually take 6 months to build.
I don't think you are, since some organizations have indeed fixed their mask shortage by authorizing KN95s. Others, it seems, prefer to stay in conservation mode so their procurement departments don't have to deal with an extra K on the forms.
The article makes some vague reference to problems which forced health organizations to abandon KN95s, but this is the first I'm hearing of it and there's not enough information to look up what they're talking about.
I don't have an N95 to compare to, but I can say this: when I had to go outside during the heavy wildfire smoke in the Seattle area last week (AQI over 200), if I put on an ear loop KN95 before stepping outside I could not smell a difference between outside and inside.
I had an air purifier running indoors which kept my indoor air to around the equivalent of AQI 10 or better most of the time. (I say equivalent because my particulate matter sensor gives ug/m^3 and counts/cm^3, not AQI, so I had to estimate AQI).
If I took the mask off outside, the difference between outside AQI 200+ and indoor AQI 10 was immediately apparent.
For everyone who is not in some job with a high risk of prolonged COVID exposure, I'd recommend going ahead and getting a KN95 even if it uses ear loops and so won't be as protective as an N95. It will still be a lot better than surgical-style masks or most homemade masks.
Use the cheaper surgical-style masks if most other people around you are also wearing masks. That's the case here for 99% of the people I see in the grocery store. But I'm not confident that people will keep that up for as long as the science says we need to--we Americans have a habit of ending things too soon. If mask wearing falls off before it should, I've got my box of KN95s to switch to.
There are very, very few people, with decisionmaking power who not tightly tied to Trumpworld, who believe the pandemic will be over in six months.
The best case timeline for mass vaccinations looks like late 2021 at the earliest, which is considerably longer than six months from today, much less six months from when the pandemic started.
Further, government funding would entirely change the economics of ramping up mask production. If government was paying the bills, it wouldn't matter to manufacturers if demand disappeared before new production capability had paid for itself, because government was paying the bill.
There are shortages everywhere... a surgical mask used to cost ~5eurocents here, now it's ~60 for "non medical", and 1eur+ for medical masks. N95 go even higher in price, compared to very cheap before.
Yes, they're available, but at that price, noone buys them (they improvise or buy washable).
Yep, it's more like a post justification bullshit. I believe the more realistic reason is that N95 masks are produced by a monopoly that doesn't want neither expand production to satisfy short term rise in demand nor give up its monopolistic position for others to do it, hence the shortage of masks in the country where it has monopoly. (There isn't a shortage of masks in my country and hasn't been for months.)
What is your hypothesis for why the UK, Germany, France, Russia, China, etc. have not been able to simply dictate sufficient capacity? Even if we assume the US is going to be uniquely awful in this regard, we could just buy from those countries if they had all been able to dictate capacity. They haven't.
Perhaps they've not got the US certification and therefore US hospitals can't legally use them? Doesn't stop anyone buying some for their family though.
Cost isn't the problem. The problem is that there's only two companies in the world with the technical expertise to make these machines, they have a high failure rate, and literally every country on the planet simultaneously demanded new production capacity. I admit, I don't know for certain, but I feel very confident that the tiny number of people with applicable expertise are extremely busy right now.
Yup, and lots of folks here are missing that point or don't appreciate it enough. While I've never dealt with N95 masks or anything medical, there's a few things that immediately pop into my mind.
1. What's the certification process to get "N95"? From the body armor world (I was in it for just a little while years ago, things may have changed in the last 5+ years), getting NIJ certified is not completely simple. It's a time consuming process to get and keep standards (testing and manufacturing) to keep a ballistic grade. 1-3 months for new testing when the labs aren't swamped with armor to test (first timers in the field get "extra" testing). Since a N95 mask is life safety, I assume there's a process of submitting to 3rd party labs for quality, gov inspection of your manufacturing process and the batch testing against with 3rd party labs. How long does it take and how much does it cost? Just because you're finally up and running 6 months later, doesn't mean you're done. It would suck to do all that, then have the current leaders just steam roll your little operation's ass to crippling debt and layoffs.
2. What are the material requirements and how's that supply chain looking? If "everyone" is making N95 masks, how hard is it to even get the qualified materials needed? It would suck to pay all the money for equipment, training, personnel and the lab testing fees, then find out you can't even get enough stock of the materials. Then just to enter a completely flooded field. Older players get first dibs from distributors due to prior relationships both in time and yearly purchase amounts.
That's the two things off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure there's more, bigger issues I'm ignorant of.
Now, do I believe that there should be an "strategic supply of smaller manufacturers" that are prepped pre-crisis to fulfill such needs? Absol-fucking-lutely. But that's to be setup pre-crisis. Not during. Covid is a wake up call on the manufacturing needs of the USA. Any argument that globalization will save the USA in crisis is now dead and out the window. This applies to every other country too. Covid showed that every country has to think their own country first before they can help others. Situations like these makes things way more complicated and difficult on an already complex, fragile system. Just In Time Inventory only works if everything is "good and stable". While I love LEAN and understand the economic advantage of JIT, you still have to plan for big fuck ups, whether you like it or not. Reality doesn't seem to care what we all like.
Covid so far has been a love-tap of problem. If this was worse than a 0.5% yearly infection rate and worse than a 2% death rate, there would have been some serious, long term problems that we don't even want to imagine.
We’ve been dealing with the pandemic in America now for more than 6 months, and even the most optimistic timeline for a vaccine will leave us with a long period of time while hundreds of millions - really bullions - of doses are manufactured and distributed.
Imagine if we had ramped up N95 production in March.
There is UNLIMITED money available to the government to fight this pandemic. The Fed simply prints the money, as they have, in the trillions of dollars since it began. Money is not the issue. The government has not made masks a priority. Biden won't do much better - I suspect he's pretty inept.
Production isn't the issue either - if you wave enough money in front of the private sector, they will do anything.
Prez simply makes a statement - every person will have N95 masks available to them - and we're going to do whatever we need to do to make that happen. It's better politically to guarantee everyone a $1200 check. This pandemic reveals the weaknesses in our systems.
> The Department of Health and Human Services did fund the invention of a “one-of-a-kind, high-speed machine” that could make 1.5 million N95s per day. But when the design was completed in 2018, the Trump administration did not purchase it.
The administration had a chance to buy machines that could do it but chose not to. Hindsight is 20/20.
> Except that in 2009, while Fuller was in his first job out of college, the H1N1 flu epidemic depleted 85 million N95s from the national stockpile — and the supply was never replenished. In 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017, public health officials published alarming reports warning of a “massive gap” in what remained. Even more concerning, they said, the vast majority of N95s and the materials needed to manufacture them were now being made in Asia.
The previous administration didn’t care either and chose to not replenish stockpiles over a decade ago.
In a pandemic situation where a hospital worker should be using a new mask with each transition to a different patient, they would be using tens of thousands of masks per day per hospital for a decent sized hospital. At that rate even the 85 million masks is just a drop in the bucket.
If we're going to argue that then take it to its next logical step and just argue that we shouldn't stockpile them at all. I get that the current guy screwed the pooch by not doing what should have been done, but we should also acknowledge that people prior to him also made mistakes and learn from them so we don't repeat it.
Two things can be true at once. It can be true that we should have stockpiles. It can also be true that such stockpiles are only ever going to be sufficient for relatively contained outbreaks like H1N1.
I agree, and that was my point. You seemed to brush off that a previous leader made a mistake because it was less significant than a current leader. I'm saying it's important to recognize that both messed up and in the future we should avoid both mistakes.
Only in the sense that it could help prevent healthcare workers themselves from becoming carriers. If the disease is "in the wild" and has already gotten past the capacity of contact tracing and containment procedures, it's a moot point.
I'm confused, how does funding the invention of a machine to enable the mass production of masks mean they don't care? Seems to me that the idea was solving problem A meant solving problem B.
> "All government agencies agree that a shortage of respirators will occur during a pandemic. So, we have a real opportunity to demonstrate our expertise and help make a difference in an area of critical need by performing research on the ability to develop an on-demand, high-speed machine that will make use of stockpiled raw materials to produce respirators."
We are talking about the masks specifically. Public health officials cautioned 2 administrations about the US lacking the ability to readily produce masks in the event of a crisis. Specifically saying everything is now in Asia.
Yes, and as a result, the US government contracted a company to develop a machine to be able to create 1.5 million masks per day. Instead of having a stockpile, which itself is not a guarantee of having enough masks, this seems to be the logical path forward. Meaning that those warnings in 2013 and 2014 were heeded and acted on by creating this contract in 2015 (and apparently they contracted two separate companies).
Perhaps you misinterpreted the term respirator to not mean mask?
I see you're much more caustic towards the administration that hasn't been in power for almost 4 years than the actual president who has been in office for almost 4 years.
Without FoxNews and Limbaugh, this isnt possible. So why do they want Americans to die? Why do they want them fighting each other?
That's the real issue and one that I am sad to say far too many HN posters are working on and against daily...
Advertising and content engagement. These two things and their unfettered pursuits have destroyed America. When the only thing that matters is the pursuit of money, based on false metrics and false promises, we die. And yes, we're watching America die.
I dabbled in procurement in this area. Its a big sad joke. Better leadership could help but only marginally.
Price gouging statutes added an unnecessary distraction to market signals, as they confused consumers and governors and wasted public resources trying to enforce. It is impossible to enforce them because legislatures didn't give power to curb market signals indefinitely and States have zero tools to handle states of emergencies in reaction to a disaster that is larger than their state, continues growing in scope, and that never ends. To allow the market signals to work for increasing production, states could have subsidized over a certain $ price, shielding consumers but allowing market to still function. The ideal result being that other companies took the risk of creating more product until the market was flooded with the masks.
The global procurement game was and still is a joke.
I agree. Early on, people were blaming Trump because the CDC was caught with their pants down on their one job--I argued that Trump (for all his incompetence) can't be blamed for this--CDC should have had plans for this after SARS and MURS (well before his presidency). But that defense no longer applies after 7 months. Trump has earned his criticism, as he is apparently determined to do (however, there are also many in the media who are determined to beclown themselves by using misleading metrics to exaggerate the impact of his incompetence, which of course doesn't constitute valid criticism).
IANAD but as I understand it - if everyone is wearing cloth masks correctly, you're very well protected as cloth masks prevent droplets containing the virus from entering the air. But if someone without a mask coughs, breaths, sings etc and has the virus, those virus-laden microscopic droplets enter the air and your normal cloth mask won't do much of anything to help keep you protected from them.
An N95 will filter out some/most of those microscopic droplets before you inhale them.
TL;DR - your cloth mask mostly helps protect other people, while an N95 mask helps protect you.
It's probably all a matter of degree but, yes, likely something like that if masks are properly fitted and used.
That said, at least where I live in a very blue state, people are quite good--I haven't seen any exceptions--about wearing masks indoors and (mostly) covering mouth and nose.
But all that talk early on about not touching face and mask etc.? Pretty much everyone pops a mask on their face as they go to enter a building and take it off as they leave. I'm skeptical most people would use N95 masks even if they were available for free.
The US does not even need to ramp up PPE production. Mask availability is good outside of the US, but you don't know if you are importing a fake one, unfortunately. This is solvable.
What's needed is additional certification labs and US-based quality control for imported N95/KN95 masks. It is very cheap to set up a new lab - all you need to test a mask is a ~$1000 sub-micron particle counter. Just keep buying samples of masks from various manufacturers and make sure they are not slipping on quality.
3M and Powecom now offer one-time-use authenticity code for masks they ship (see https://safeguard.3m.com) and other manufacturers will likely follow soon. This means that you don't have to worry about the middlemen doing importing and distribution swapping the product for counterfeit - all you need is a quality reputation score for manufacturers themselves, making the problem much easier.
This is of course should've all been done by the CDC and US Customs already but they are dropping the ball and doing only a limited amount testing. Maybe universities can step up and use their labs for testing?
---
Additional PSA for people reading this thread: you can buy reputable-looking KN95 masks from Office Depot(!) right now. It's an ear-loop design which is not ideal, but you could fix the rubberbands yourself easily.
Kn95's are being tested it seems, and they are failing..
─ ECRI testing of imported FFRs has revealed that 60-70%
provide only sub-95% filtration performance.
■ This trend aligns with what NIOSH has found through
their own testing; as of September 2, 2020, 53% of
the 358 FFR models tested did not meet N95 filtration
requirements
Thanks for linking to the report, it's interesting reading.
I think it largely confirms the point of my post though - we need independent certification labs in the US to make imported PPE usable. It is unclear what % of reported quality failures in that report were due to counterfeits. Now that the manufacturers have authenticity codes on their product we can hold manufacturers directly accountable for filtering performance.
> I think it largely confirms the point of my post though - we need independent certification labs in the US to make imported PPE usable. It is unclear what % of reported quality failures in that report were due to counterfeits. Now that the manufacturers have authenticity codes on their product we can hold manufacturers directly accountable for filtering performance.
I agree, but we've seen that be corrupted by profit-seeking
Yesterday we received a box from a relative in South Korea with 90 KF94 masks (the Korean equivalent to N95). They would have sent us more but the post office said there was a restriction on sending too many out. It took 3 days to arrive in the U.S. There is no mask shortage of these high quality masks in South Korea.
A family member works as a nurse at a hospital. Protocol was that each time they entered a room, they put on a new N95. If they had to step out to get something - need another mask. According to them, this was all due to federal guidelines and state accreditation monitoring.
They blew through their supply in no time at the start of the pandemic.
Now, they get a single mask and wear it until it is obviously no good.
the amount of trash produced by masks lately must be stunning. When I go on hikes there are masks lying around everywhere. Can't even imagine how many of them will show up in oceans.
I purchased a single digit number of N95 masks because of some upcoming travel. I purchased them at inflated prices from eBay. I wonder if I am taking masks from someone that needs them more. I wish we had more emergency regulation about who is able to purchase medical equipment during an emergency. I feel very uneasy about this purchase. Should I donate the remaining unused masks to a local hospital — dispute low numbers of COVID-19 cases (I’m in a State where the case numbers are dropping)?
COVID-19 has really held a mirror in front us collectively, and what we see mostly is ugliness of the kind many people haven’t been exposed to en masse (or maybe not for quite sometime).
Talking about India, it’s soon set to cross the U.S. in total number of cases, now that the strict lockdowns have been lifted (and the economy battered by the lockdowns).
The situation with N95 masks was dire even in April, and there have been investigative reports on the “mask mafia” [1] who hoard these masks, engage in price gouging and also sell a lot of counterfeit (almost useless) masks using names like 3M.
We always knew that people will profit from any situation, but “disaster capitalism” is quite prominent in the handling of COVID-19. I can’t wait to see what happens when the vaccines arrive (there are already rumors of a looking disposable syringe shortage, which would affect people who routinely need these) and how many people are going to be injected with fake stuff and reused syringes and what not.
First I'd like to see some good scientific proof that masks are effective against Covid-19 spread. We've dropped the science on that and no one seems interested in clearly proving that they are effective or ineffective. Instead we're railing each other based on our political views.
Experts at NIH CDC and universities have changed their dictates, dropped the ball and finally fallen in line on separate political sides of such issues. I guess Man is, after all, the "political animal" first and foremost.
N95 is the best for Dr. working in the closed HVAC env, for outdoor and shopping, L1-L3 surgical mask might be better actually.
The material to make N95 is the time consuming part, I think Houston can do it but not sure if any company created the production line. Without those raw material, there will always be N95 shortage, building it in USA is not cost-effective in the past.
Keep in mind that polypropylene meltblown material (main filtering material) is used in surgical masks just as much, as well as polypropylene spunbond, but somehow they are produced in enough quantity everywhere in the world to satisfy demand of the whole world. The only extra material that surgical masks don't use is probably just "hot air cotton", but it isn't a filtering material, it's a spongy form making material and I doubt there is a shortage of it, given that KN95 and other FFP3/FFP2 masks that use it are available in many countries today and were available all summer.
Ironically the problem is due to extreme demand by the general public due to virtue signaling by wearing masks.
However, when you compare wearing rates vs either reported or estimated infection rates three weeks later, there is no correlation at all.
It seems all the general public gets out of wearing masks is warm fuzzies and virtue signaling and implementation of authoritarianism.
Another novelty is fake news sites like http://covid19.healthdata.org/ have consistently for more than half a year displayed projections of the death rate where doing nothing will go exponential next month, wearing masks will flatline in two months, and the history now going back six months regardless of public behavior in lockdown or freedom, don't wear masks and save them for first responders or everyone should wear masks 24x7 ideally, its a boring flat line around twice the death rate from automobiles.
Clearly someone is operating the 21st century equivalent of the:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/16/8149292...