Im also wondering... There's been a lot of criticism of federal folks and their reaction to covid. But what's about the states? They still have pretty wide powers and should have intervened.
Isn't it within the power of individual states to stimulate manufacturing of masks.
What powers would those be? AFAIK there’s no state level Defense Production Act, for example.
If you mean just putting out guaranteed orders, not every state has the capacity to manufacture PPE, even fewer have money to pay for it.
One might suggest that multiple states get together and induce manufacturing in the states where they have capacity. We did that. It’s called the federal government, and it’s choosing not to utilize those powers.
Offer them tax abatements and regulatory easement? At the very least, it means more local jobs, which should incentivize states & municipalities to compete for such plants.
I guess it really depends on what you mean by "stimulating" manufacturing. They're only recourse, really, is to make purchases of the equipment (does increased demand count as stimulating?). The federal government, and only the federal government, has the power to compel industries to manufacture under the Defense Production Act.
This was a major point of contention at the beginning of the outbreak in the US. Governor's were lobbying the feds to invoke the act, although the administration declined to do so. The end result was that states were competing with each other for heavily inflated PPE costs. In some cases, the feds themselves were outbidding states.
But somehow China manages to stimulate its' manufacturing without involving wartime laws. I don't know how they do it, but may be the US needs a bit of the same too.
There is one fundamental difference. States don't control the currency. The federal government can print money to solve this issue. States can't, they can only raise taxes.
Such unfair moderation. The author of this article has a whole string of anti-Trump pieces up at the npr.org site. He left out a lot of pertinent information, like the new Pennsylvania plant that's just started up. Furthermore, he's no medical expert. I'm disappointed in NPR for publishing such a puff piece.
Honestly, your comment does a better job of describing your original and follow up posts more then the article.
Your original post pulled the following: "Still, President Trump consistently ignores that reality." This statement in the article is then followed up with facts on the current situation. It's pretty fine journalism.
Really? That is absolutely not fine. The follow up is the trump quote "We've opened up factories". That has no direct connection to people unable finding masks. So the "ignores that reality" is completely unfounded. That formulation in itself is highly unprofessional, no matter what it is about. Contrasting his "ignoring" with "reality" is framing his actions as self-evidently wrong. And the word consistent implies that he is always wrong. That's at least three reasons why this sentence alone is nothing but propaganda.
"We've opened up factories" implies "So we're fine," but even with these new production lines, we'll still be shy a billion or so masks the first year. That's a connection, in my opinion, justifying the "ignores that reality."
The dozens of clips circulating from March through last week where he publicly says the virus will just "disappear" are, pretty obviously, a conscious ignorance of the reality. (Since, as we've seen, warm weather nor a few months of time have stopped the pandemic.)
The only way you could even charitably say that he's not "consistently ignoring the reality" of the pandemic would be by pointing out the exceptions to those public comments -- his private, recorded comments to Woodward earlier this year where he acknowledged the deadly impact and aerosol nature of the virus.
There are tons of articles about Trump's handling of the virus with perspectives you might appreciate more; perhaps you could submit some to HN for discussion. Here are some helpful suggestions: The Daily Caller, Breitbart, and PatriotNewsEagleFreedom1776.
I recommend Moldex. They are under the radar and their plastic mesh isn't readily counterfeited, which is happening now with 3M. They are crushable and pop back into shape. Plus the high end models have nicer sliding straps. Just beware they have no metal bridge and have two different forms to accommodate different nose shapes.
You can also add &search=N95 KN95 to find and highlight search terms. There might be other parameters but I do not know them off the back of my head. It's a great and totally under-used feature. Almost like the timestamped, searchable transcripts on Youtube...
Because 'anti price gouging' laws prevent the price going high enough to make it worth someone going to extreme efforts to upscale production.
Without those laws, the price going from $1 per mask to $10 per mask would still be very much affordable for everyone who really needs a mask, and factories who can successfully get decent production underway will earn lots, making it worthwhile to take on the risk of chasing a (possibly short lived) demand.
Who pays for factories to purchase new equipment and hire more workers to produce more masks then? The companies selected by the government to do so have more or less flopped, as they had more political connections than skill in producing masks.
How do you define outrageous? The shortage is because of how short they last (and the massive spike in demand). If that is the price it takes for supply to meet demand, I can see calling it unnaceptable, but I don't see how it is outrageous, unless you can point to some other decision that led to the cost being nessasary.
In practice, I don't think $10/mast is unnaceptable. That is about 15 minutes worth of an ICU nurse's time[0]. In terms of costs that this pandemic is causing, even "expensive" masks are a cheep.
We able to get five days of use out of ours if we let them rest and decontaminate for five days between usage. Even after still pass the fit-test and work well - we just throw them away out of an abundance of caution.
Even the ones we get from 3M South Korea at about $20 each winds up costing just pennies per hour.
If you don't mind answering, what decontamination method are you using? That CDC link merely refers mask users to the mask manufacturers.
How have you found reuse to effect fit and performance?
From the CDC page you linked:
"Decontamination of an N95 FFR inactivates viruses and bacteria on the device, but does not restore the N95 FFR to “new” performance. Decontamination studies have evaluated the effect of the decontamination process on the fit and filtration performance of N95 FFRs; however, these studies did not consider the likelihood that N95 FFRs worn by healthcare personnel are likely donned and doffed multiple times before undergoing decontamination. N95 FFR performance will decrease as the number of hours and number of donnings and doffings increase. Repeated decontamination and handling of FFRs can damage the fit and filtration performance of N95 FFRs. Fit performance during limited reuse, including decontaminated FFRs, should be monitored by the respiratory protection program manager or appropriate safety personnel. Information about how to assess N95 FFR fit during limited reuse can be found below...."
Sorry for the delay - we age and rotate resperators. The virus is presumed inactive after four days, so we have a weeks worth rotating at any one time.
We store them in paper bags to let them dry out.
Given we rarely actually have to go out of our home offices, it works well. 20 resperatore lasts about three months per person.
If you need more - you can get 3M N95 from South Korea - about $200 for twenty.
Again, I call bullshit. What social norm says a company can’t put together a business model of making n95 masks and trying to sell those? The only social norm is against re-selling for massive gains during a pandemic. Not manufacturing and making a profit.
“Massive gains” allow a quicker recoup of the massive investment almost certainly required to procure materials and manufacture masks. Obviously, the current need for masks is artificially high due to the pandemic. And when the pandemic eventually ends, the massive demand for masks will end along with it.
Let’s say it takes 5 years to recoup that initial investment to procure materials and manufacture masks at current pricing. Most experts agree the pandemic will have run its course within a year or two. So common sense says getting into the mask business where it will take 5 years to recoup your losses is a bad bet.
But if pricing was allowed to follow demand, there is more incentive for aspiring mask manufacturers to take those risks. Maybe the cost to ramp up production can be covered in a couple of years or maybe even a couple of months. That mitigates risk and given opportunity like that, existing mask manufacturers will be better incentivized to scale their production more rapidly. And then more masks get produced quickly, scarcity decreases, and pricing eventually finds equilibrium again.
But because we don’t allow “gouging” (whether for legal or social reasons), the mask shortage will continue until existing manufacturers can produce enough to meet demand. And some people that need PPE won’t have it easily available until then, but we will feel awfully good about making sure nobody got gouged. After all, nobody gets gouged if there is nothing to buy.
Why not just massive investment in making masks that everyone can afford, given historically low interest rates the government is basically spending with free money
Yes, obviously - what did you think deficit spending was? But the point is the cost of fiscal expenditure is lower than it has been in the past, and it seems like we have a really useful thing we could be spending it on.
To me, it seems like normal "propensity to consume + ability to pay" style distribution of masks won't help that much in a pandemic that disproportionately spreads among the poor and where the more people wearing the mask, the better.
National government public debt, held by a government that borrows its own currency, is not the same as private debt. For all intents and purposes, it doesn't have to be paid back.
Then it's cronyism - the government gives free resources to one set of manufacturers and the rest are on their own. And do you think the government handed out that money based on merit? Or based on lobbying, political preferences, or name recognition?
As Friedman famously asked - who are the angels that are supposed to make these wise, unbiased decisions on our behalf?
> Or based on lobbying, political preferences, or name recognition?
Ah yes, as opposed to the rational private market of large capital investments to create new industries, which is apolitical and has no cronyism /s (never mind no price incentive to massively invest in large-scale manufacturing for a temporary pandemic)
The market at least has a means of rewarding the rational and punishing the irrational. As you imply, cronyism is how irrational advantage is gained. And price controls are another form of cronyism, as they exclusively protect the entrenched in a market from competition.
There is no "the market." To some extent, I agree with you for publicly traded markets.
I do not think it even remotely holds in the illiquid limit of massive-scale private capital investment markets. I would rather that power be wielded by actors exercising public power shaped by institutional constraints than by private actors who can wield it in an arbitrary manner, particularly in the context of a pandemic where there is a huge societal difference between 10 $10 masks and 100 $1 ones.
On the contrary, there is nothing but the market. It can be free, controlled, or somewhere in between. Capital is always traded for goods and services, but it’s not always financial capital.
Making collective decisions to allocate resources to support needs that markets will not, or cannot, do is precisely why governments exist.
Governments that are democratically accountable to the people are far more likely to create outcomes that support collective social needs than are business owners who are accountable to no one.
The fact that the United States does such a poor job of this is an indictment of poor governance, and lack of democratic accountability, than a weakness of the principle of government in general. Other countries do far better at this--note the universal availability of rated masks in places like Korea and Japan from day one of the pandemic--and there is a reason the US is ranked 22nd, and falling, for public corruption.[0]
You missed my point; perhaps I wasn’t clear. Manufacturers can charge whatever price. Price gouging is only when you scoop up already made products to sell at a higher price, no value add.
But being able to “overcharge” provides immediate incentives for others to produce. And when production finds equilibrium with market demand, the price is back to normal (or even cheaper than before if there is too much product in the market).
Artificially cheap prices also encourage hoarding and opportunistic buying by those willing to sell on the black market. And that just compounds the problem.
So while your desire to prevent gouging is admirable, it is also counterproductive.
> And when production finds equilibrium with market demand, the price is back to normal (or even cheaper than before if there is too much product in the market).
Are you citing any data for this or are you just assuming this will happen? In my experience when production equals demand everyone continues selling at the ridiculously high prices for months. In a pandemic like this one that's months of watching the death toll climb.
There is a very real cost of sticking to a free market ideology when people are dying.
Data? It's literally the definition of supply and demand. And when there is competition in the marketplace, lower prices and accepting smaller margins is inevitably used to gain competitive advantage. If prices stay artificially high (and uniform) across multiple manufacturers after there is plenty of product in the marketplace, then there may be collusion. Collusion is illegal and should be prosecuted accordingly.
And to address your alarmism: if people are dying, it's safe to assume that a lack of PPE contributes to that. And people don't have PPE because the free market isn't being allowed to produce it. That's the point.
During a hurricane ("when people are dying"), which pricing model do you think keeps fuel re-suppliers taking on the associated risk to move gas in to the areas that most need it?
I'm not aware of these laws being enforced for covid-19. I bought some masks over the summer and they were much more than $10 per.
[EDIT] To be more specific here. Price gouging laws apply to retailers, not manufacturers. Price gouging basically covers retailers hording supply to artificially inflate the price during an emergency. That's not what's going on here. Manufacturers don't have capacity to meet demand. They are free to adjust the price in response.
If that was actually a reason, don’t you think the article would have mentioned it? Also, if it is a reason, can you please cite to which law? I’m not aware of a law saying a manufacturer can’t set the price of n95 mask. A re-seller, however wouldn’t be able to hoard supply and then do a 10x price increase, which would be price gouging. If there was a competent firm that could offer n95 masks at any price to any of the hundreds of hospitals, I’d wager they could charge whatever price they want at this point.
Removing price gouging laws wouldn't fix the problem. Setting up new N95 mask production lines takes huge capital investment. Manufacturers won't make that investment unless they have assurance of long term sales beyond the current pandemic. State and federal governments could solve that by issuing long-term purchase contracts to build up stockpiles.
That can cut both ways: the possibility of "price gouging" can also encourage speculation, both for those hoping to turn a profit and for those who over-buy compared to expected use to ensure price stability.
Quotas are hard to enforce meaningfully. They work well when people are already disposed to be helpful - but even then they still have issues.
Our local grocery chain had a quota on milk (for good reason) and the amount of fights and nearly brawls over it were amazing, despite being a need for some families and not others (it's inconvenient to me to not have cereal, it's a big deal for someone with young kids to not have milk) and generally reasonable limits (up to 2 gallons, more than enough for cereal/coffee/baking).
People go to crazy limits to evade the quotas (visiting multiple stores, making multiple purchases in the same trip, etc) and often times they do simply because the quota exists - how many people actually buy more than 2 gallons of milk normally?
TLDR, people are dumb fearful animals and that can cause quotas to backfire in a way that price controls don't (but they have other downsides).
If you let prices go up, that will mostly prevent regular people from hoarding. You only have to enforce quotas against quasi-professionals looking to spend big, buy in massive bulk, and corner the market.
> Quotas are hard to enforce meaningfully. They work well when people are already disposed to be helpful - but even then they still have issues.
That's not true, you just have to design them properly. For instance: 3M knows its customers, and can decide give retail hardware stores an N95 quota of zero and hospital systems large quotas, roughly based on need. Those organizations aren't going to get into slap fights in an aisle.
> Our local grocery chain had a quota on milk (for good reason) and the amount of fights and nearly brawls over it were amazing
An unsourced anecdote about a failure of an unspecified retail quota system is not good evidence against emergency quotas in general. It might not even be accurate.
> People go to crazy limits to evade the quotas (visiting multiple stores, making multiple purchases in the same trip, etc) and often times they do simply because the quota exists - how many people actually buy more than 2 gallons of milk normally?
IMHO, the main goal of loosely-enforced retail quotas like those is not so much to strictly limit people to the quota, but to increase friction to frustrate hoarders and profiteers.
See, this is a problem. Idiots/scalpers/resellers/paranoids raiding hardware stores for masks is terrible, but construction was considered an essential business country-wide and never halted meaning you still had minimum wage day laborers (not to mention unionized construction workers making well over that) working in environments N95 masks were designed for that had no access to PPE but still needed to report for work because they need to put food on the table and don’t legally qualify for unemployment (since the jobs are there and they’re not being fired/laid off).
> but construction was considered an essential business country-wide and never baked meaning you still had minimum wage day laborers (and unionized construction workers making well over that) working in environments N95 masks were designed for that had no access to PPE but still needed to report for work
IMHO, most N95s on retail shelves probably wouldn't have gone to construction workers anyway; they'd have been snatched up by consumers with no real need. I do think it would have been reasonable allocate a quota to to go to construction supply companies that weren't open to the general public, though, for precisely the reasons you outlined.
This story is pretty interesting, construction workers/companies are having to make similar kinds of adaptations to the shortage as healthcare workers are:
> To combat supply shortages, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has temporarily adjusted some of its requirements for both health-care and construction workers, including allowing them to wear N95 respirator masks for longer than their intended use — normally a day or two for construction workers — and to use other types of respirators, such as KN95s shipped from China....
> OSHA is advising employers to reduce the need for N95 masks at jobsites any way they can, a Department of Labor spokesperson said. The National Association of Home Builders advises those who can’t find masks to minimize dust by vacuuming and wet cutting.
The article even talked about construction companies and unions donating their existing mask stockpiles.
> how many people actually buy more than 2 gallons of milk normally?
We certainly do. At least six gallons at a time, because my time is money (and mostly because grocery shopping is a chore) and I don’t want to make repeated trips to the grocery store when I don’t have to. I calculate the consumption rate for adults, babies, and toddlers in the house and based off the expiration date and my own experimental findings (based largely off of fridge temperature and brand of milk as a proxy for homogenization method/temperature/duration) I get the maximum I can without it spoiling, which happened just once due to a bad batch that must have been stored wrong in shipping because it spoiled before even the sell by date.
That's not the behaviour observed in the past. E.g. bottled water after Katrina was sold at eye watering prices, by the crate, to those who could afford it even though others actually needed water urgently. It still went in large quantities to people stockpiling.
Capitalism isn't effective at distributing by need, only by ability to pay.
"unless they have assurance of long term sales beyond the current pandemic"
Nailed it. Yep. Building a massive production line with complex equipment and training only to be bankrupt in 6 months is a fools errand. The is why we have a government - when we need something that capitalism cannot supply. But they wont, so we don't.
>> Building a massive production line with complex equipment and training only to be bankrupt in 6 months is a fools errand.
> Not if they can make all of their money back in 6 months via extreme prices. However we are past the "extreme prices" phase of the pandemic.
But to do that, you'd have to bring the new production capacity online on day 1, which is unrealistic. The timelines just don't make sense. New factories don't just pop into existence; it take time to build them and bring them online.
The main thing that would actually happen if price gouging was allowed is that parasitic middlemen would drive up the prices of existing stock by flipping it (making only a personal profit and doing no social good). Existing manufacturers might do that too, if they're not concerned with losing goodwill by pissing off their current customers.
Back in the day we had GOCO (govt owned company operated) facilities to handle things like ammunition manufacture (they still exist). But this administration has made it clear they won't do that for PPE.
In this case, government is actually preventing capitalism from being tried. But you see that as capitalism has failed and only government can save us.
> $1 per mask to $10 per mask would still be very much affordable for everyone who really needs a mask
teachers and many essential workers who need masks the most are also most vulnerable to unexpected expenses like PPE costs. and the organizations they work for typically have strict budges and can usually only provide limited supplies.
You mean the teachers at my school district that regularly spend $3m/year on diesel fuel for busing students (and the drivers wages, half the drivers are 'temps') that are sitting unused?
Are you saying you school isn't transporting students? Also, are you saying the teachers have anything to do with that cost?
My district had to double its busing budget this year due to restrictions on the number of students that could be on each bus. This led to even further cuts into the classroom budgets.
I read it that way as well. But I think the idea was that the district would normally spend $3 million on gas, and some unspecified amount on drivers. Presumably, they aren’t spending that money now, so there should be money available for masks for the teachers.
Except, they aren’t spending that much now because they aren’t bringing the kids to school. Why would the teachers need masks?
My district is bringing half the students to school each day, with a different half on different days. But they still drive the buses the same distance, and still need the same number of drivers.
Requiring employers to fund PPE purchases seems like a reasonable answer to this problem. $10/day/employee is a modest cost of doing business when compared with other labor expenses.
We have made other mandated changes which have been vastly more expensive.
> Without those laws, the price going from $1 per mask to $10 per mask would still be very much affordable for everyone who really needs a mask, and factories who can successfully get decent production underway will earn lots
Friend owns a textile factory in India. They immediately began production of masks, which they sold at something like a 10,000% premium. (Re-tooling is expensive, so their profits weren’t exorbitant. Though they were larger than normal, which incentivises the work.) Once the premium diminished, they went back to making clothes.
India has anti-gouging laws. But they are loosely enforced to the point of non-existence. In America, we not only have such laws, we also have a media circus and cancel subculture that strongly discourages such responses.
N95 masks? or conventional cloth masks? A real N95 requires an expensive high tech layer called meltblown textile that a textile factory can't just start making overnight.
Meltblown isn't that limited in supply and from all the masks it is wasted mostly on surgical masks, not N95, since surgical masks use the same sickness meltblown layer, but are produced in much higher quantities.
That's not accurate at all. Allowing the price to float freely would help with short term supply and demand issues, but it would not fundamentally solve the long term uncertainty for suppliers about whether or not a large quantity of masks are still going to be needed next year given that supposedly multiple vaccines will be coming onto the market at the same time.
Case in point: there was a great piece a while back about a domestic mask manufacturer who ramped up production for the H1N1 outbreak only to see demand collapse when the pandemic turned out to be far less severe than expected [1]. They almost went out of business because there was no where to sell their masks at a profit and had to unwind most of their operations.
The solution here is for the federal government to backstop the orders. If no buyer can be found at price $x / mask, then the government will buy them and put them into the national stockpiles for the future.
> Because 'anti price gouging' laws prevent the price going high enough to make it worth someone going to extreme efforts to upscale production.
While theoretically price gauging is an incentive to increase production, if that's all you're thinking about, you're dealing with a toy model that has little connection to the real world. Toy models can be super compelling and elegant, but that doesn't make them reality. You have to deal with other factors, like
* The influence of parasitic middlemen only looking to flip goods and drive up the price for quick personal profit. In most of these cases, the period of increased demand is so short this is the only effect you'll see, since there's no time to bring new capacity online, but you have all the downsides of increased prices.
* Does price gouging actually direct the scarce resource to where it's needed? Markets often are very irrational, so this can't reasonably be assumed (e.g. during a famine, the market would direct food to the rich and well-fed even if they just were going to waste it on opulent banquets, because they have the money to pay the price).
* People are actually motivated by things other than greed, even though models of behavior are simplified by assuming greed is their only (or main) motivation.
* New production will come online to meet demand, even without price gouging. How much more production would price gouging motivate? Is that production worth the social cost?
* You can't build a sustainable greed-motivated business on building factories to price-gouge. A brand new market entrant is likely to have a pretty poor product compared to established players, and will likely go bankrupt once demand returns to normal. They might not even get their product out the door in time to take advantage of the high prices. It could be a predictable case of "buy high, sell low."
* New techniques will be developed to more efficiently use current production, which may pull the rug out from under anyone who made a heavy capital investment based on the surge demand.
* Etc.
> Without those laws, the price going from $1 per mask to $10 per mask would still be very much affordable for everyone who really needs a mask, and factories who can successfully get decent production underway will earn lots, making it worthwhile to take on the risk of chasing a (possibly short lived) demand.
IIRC, the price gougers drive up the price even higher than $10.
In some ways i agree but i can't help wonder, is this one of those cases where something doesn't work very well (in this case capitalism) but the suggested answer is MORE capitalism.
What i've just said obviously over-simplifies and in some large respects does a dis-service to capitalism BUT i still can't help but feel we need an improvement. It's not good enough yet.
I think that anti-price gouging laws allow the government to easily protect people who would otherwise have to pay very high prices for goods they need right now. On top of that, anti-price gouging laws coupled with Defense Production Act measures and purchase limits within stores should prove effective at alleviating shortages.
Despite a lack of DPA measures and the existence of anti-price gouging laws, masks remain readily available. For example, asimpleshop.com (made by a fellow HN user) has masks ready for a reasonable price. The fact that everyone does not have access to good KN95 masks comes from a national lack of will, not a lack of national resources.
Back in March when this all started, the machines and fabric are all available, but without a contract that companies can guarantee a market on, the companies won't do it. Price may help with the Extreme part of your argument, but plenty of businesses did their due diligence and are not jumping in because they need to sell a lot of these at scale for a while to start making a profit. Ideally, once we found the ones in the national stock pile were being hoarded by Jared, and that they were falling a part due to age, it should have been a priority to offer businesses contracts to get the masks produced.
This is what is known as "anarchy of production" which is a key feature of capitalism. A global crisis like this is not compatible with our existing economic systems.
Based on my experiences buying other things on Amazon, there will be a "masks" factory. People will be churning out tons and tons of counterfeit N95 masks. They will invest in printing believable CE marks and putting all the touches that would be present on a medical-grade mask. And people will buy them believing that the masks are high-quality and that they are safe wearing them.
I have read it. Have you? I'm trying to be helpful. Here are a few key quotes:
Thus, the maximum length of continuous use in non-dusty healthcare workplaces is typically dictated by hygienic concerns (e.g., the respirator was discarded because it became contaminated) or practical considerations (e.g., need to use the restroom, meal breaks, etc.), rather than a pre-determined number of hours.
Extended use alone is unlikely to degrade respiratory protection.
If no manufacturer guidance is available, preliminary data(19, 20) suggests limiting the number of reuses to no more than five uses per device to ensure an adequate safety margin.
The most significant risk is of contact transmission from touching the surface of the contaminated respirator.
Basically, the major risk factors for extended use and reuse is contamination of the respirator resulting in infection from handling it and damage rendering the respirator inferior (e.g. due to improper seal). Also, these guidelines are for clinical settings where these specific risk factors significantly elevated. For a normal person who uses the mask maybe once per week (assuming they are rotating), a single n95 mask could last quite a long time.
> Extended use refers to the practice of wearing the same N95 respirator for repeated close contact encounters with several patients, without removing the respirator between patient encounters.
You're reading it as "extended use" meaning multi-day use, but that's not what the article defines it as. You will eventually have to discard the thing as it gets soiled or becomes harder to breathe through as it collects particles.
Masks are disposable and light. It's rather unavoidable that some will be lost even if every user dutifully tried to properly dispose of them. I know I've had a mask fall from my pocket on a couple occasion.
If you’re not a reliable partner how can you expect people to invest? If someone builds a factory in the US, as soon as masks are available from China again the administration will just drop them like a rock and start ordering from China for rock bottom prices again.
I'm genuinely curious when was the last time someone voluntarily and constantly paid 250% of a cost of an equivalent product available from somewhere else?
US government does strategic planning when they make large purchases. There are also a bunch of weird laws at play, so at times you might on one hand say that "the law requires" and on the other hand consider it voluntarily paying more, because it's the US government passing laws to restrict how its own purchases are made.
You also might pay $5 for a hot dog at a stadium when you can buy them for $1 outside, so there's that.
$0.00 because even though the news has been telling me there were no N95 masks anywhere there were tons of them in NYC. They were just not at the "approved vendors".
When the market's been flooded by Chinese masks purporting to be N95 but do not actually meet the N95 specification... is sticking to a trusted supply chain really that foolish for situations where you really need the product to perform?
There was absolutely no guarantees that the masks sold via authorized vendors met any of those specifications. The authorized vendors simply happened to be entities that jumped through the ridiculous hoops established by the different procurement organizations to qualify a vendor.
NYC had street vendors selling legitimate masks bought for example via supplier that normally would be selling to Home Depot, except home depot decided to do its patriotic duty ( i was amazed when they announced it ) and stopped selling N95 masks all together.
For example this is the stuff from a qualified vendor today:
n=1 case here. When it comes to life-critical goods and supplies, I'll pay that premium and more. Globalization-sourced 3-ton jack stand is about $30. From US Jack Company, way more than 250% of that.
If there was accountability and an actual, real probability of collecting on judgements internationally, I'd have no problem with globalization. The reality is unless you are a deep-pocketed (absolute minimum 7th exponent club) actor, odds of actually getting all the way through the other side of collections are less than slim. It's still bad odds when sourcing with an "isolationist" bias, but you can knock a couple exponents off, and I'll take order of magnitude differentials all day long.
If there was a way to secure non-gamed reviews, then I'd be much more open to globalization-produced goods, but I haven't found that yet. My current rough proxy for quality is to source commercial-rated duty cycle goods if they are available, research on trades discussion forums for discussion about the manufacturer, and work up an evaluation from there. But that's really time-consuming. No way do I now "trust the market" to shake out shady players.
His cost is simply too high. If he had the masks already produced when the states were willing to pay $0.30 per mask he would have made out like a bandit but he did not have them.
> I mean, this was the story from the guy in America who was selling the masks.
Here's the link:
> This is a cycle familiar to Bowen. During what he calls "peacetime," when there are no outbreaks, there are few buyers of masks. During an epidemic, there's suddenly limitless demand.
> "Imagine if, all at once, millions of people wanted to skateboard," Bowen says.
"The skateboarding industry is not set up for spikes like that, and neither is the mask-making industry."
> Prestige Ameritech, for example, owns a limited number of machines that assemble, sew and shape the masks. A decade ago, it ramped up production in response to the swine flu outbreak by buying more machines and hiring 150 new workers.
> "We made a really big mistake," Bowen says of that decision. It took about four months to build the new machines, which are as long as a school bus and cost as much as $1 million.
> By the time they were ready, the swine flu crisis had ended, demand vaporized, and Prestige Ameritech almost went bankrupt. "One day — and it is literally almost like one day — it just quits. The demand is over, the phones stop ringing," Bowen says.
> To make matters worse, the hospitals and medical supply companies suddenly had a glut of masks; they stopped buying for months.
What do you expect the US government to do in this situation? The ventilators are not needed. The US Strategic National Stockpile does not need more ventilators. Theses weren't "tricks". These contracts were poorly negotiated based on a crazed delusion we would need them. Even Dem reps have spoken out about these contracts.
If the contracts are bad they shouldn’t have signed them. If you make a habit of just going back on your promise when it suits you, what is your word worth? Nothing.
That's not how contracts in business work. It's not a promise. It's a legal contract. In business, you're allowed to break contracts, and there is no moral harm. Rather, there are damages.
If I promise to buy a car from you for $100,000, and you spend $10,000 to make it, and I discover I don't need the car anymore, in most cases, I can walk away paying you $10,000. If you continued doing unneeded work, that'd be bad economics. If you could rake me over the coals and ask to me to pay $50k, that'd be exploitative. In most cases, the outcome of a broken contract is that I try to set things right for you by either:
* Paying you costs incurred
* Paying you expected profits
* Or similar.
Courts calculate damages by a range of formulas, which then sets standards for how business is conducted, and in most cases, people don't go to court but just agree to pay damages.
This is foreign to how most people think about agreements; it's a very different culture. But if you talk to lawyers or executives, that's how they reason about contracts.
To be blunt, that perspective is misguided and unrealistic. I assume these contracts allowed for a partial termination, this isn't uncommon. There is no indication these were broken unlawfully.
In the case with Phillips, they already delivered 1/4th of the ventilators, there are reports all over the place stating that these were overpaid for. Of course the government overpaid for these. They were in a situation were they had to. Phillips even made indications in their earnings reports that these are contributing significant profit.
These manufacturers would not hesitate to enter one of these contracts again in the future.
Invasive ventilation is a form of medical pseudoscience. While sometimes it's necessary (neck/abdominal surgery, etc), it causes tremendous barotrauma to patients' lungs, and should not be used to treat infections until randomized studies show that it's actually beneficial [0].
Someone should investigate how it came to be that anesthetizing COVID-19 patients and sticking a tube into their lungs was the standard treatment, until the front-line medical teams rebelled. [1]
There was an oversupply of ventilators after the initial panic and hysteria in the media with the likes of NY and other states not using what was available to them. The ventilator order was placed in April, which was the peak of the hysteria.
You're suggesting the government should spend $650 Million in tax payer money for something that is unnecessary and comparing it to the mask shortage? You're comparing apples and oranges trying to push your orange man bad narrative unncecessarily. 3M and a few other companies produce N95 masks stateside.
>>On Jan. 30, the last day for which data is available, China managed to import 20 million respirators and surgical masks in just 24 hours. Through February, civic-minded entrepreneurs and aid groups visited pharmacies in affluent countries and emerging markets alike, buying masks in bulk to send to China.
We promised our supplier that we would buy 30,000 ventilators. I don't know what the actual contract said but if I started ramping production in consideration of a $650 million order and my client canceled the order I would certainly try to recover some damages from them.
These were opportunistic money grab operations from for-profit companies. What's been linked is a business article which primarily includes a statement where the CEO of the for-profit company is quoted to simply say
>“It’s very unusual to have a contract like this canceled,”
noting that Philips reducing their FY profit outlook as a result, to help investors make an decision on their investments.
It's also very unusual for the government to give a company $650M dollar contract so quickly. It's obvious they wanted Philips, who was clearly perceived to be a leader in the space, to ramp up supply expecting a massive surge demand, which did not materialize. A business decision was made to cut the contract that was no longer needed.
You're welcome to try and go against the client to recover "damages" and risk future contracts from said client.
The whole point of these fast capacity ramps is that the capital investment may not be recovered over a longer period. So it's critical the order be solid before you ramp capacity.
Philips getting screwed - yeah, not going to be doing business with the govt in the future. We wonder why folks are reluctant to respond to govt directives, because the govt is schizophrenic about this stuff.
> You're suggesting the government should spend $650 Million in tax payer money for something that is unnecessary and comparing it to the mask shortage?
Yes, because next time we beg a company to ramp up production of something, it might wind up being necessary.
There's a benefit to government taking on some of the risk in these sorts of scenarios.
I don't think it was hysteria in the media, it was the belief early on by the medical field that respirators were the best treatment for COVID patients.
I'd like to think that the government bought those respirators due to medical demand, not because what they read in the newspaper.
There was no hysteria. There is standard decision-making with uncertainty. Early in the pandemic, ramping up ventilator, mask, and other production made 100% sense. That's a $1 billion hedge to help with what's turning out to be a multi-trillion dollar problem.
Indeed, it's a no-brainer decision. The expected ROI of a $1 billion ventilator order in April was astronomically high.
Conversely, cancelling the contract makes sense too, now that ventilators don't seem to be the solution. Generally, when a contract is cancelled, you pay for costs already incurred, so it's generally not unfair to do so.
Capacity is ramping up. It's surprising that the reporter (Joel Rose) didn't mention a new large Dräger plant in Pennsylvania that has begun manufacturing completely made-in-USA N-95 NIOSH-compliant masks.
3M and Honeywell are responding to HHS and DoD contracts by double or tripling their monthly output (admittedly, most of their factories are outside the U.S., in China and other places).
According to Statistica, monthly production of these masks will rise from 45 million units in January 2020 to 180 million units by end of year. Maybe this is insufficient but it's certainly better than nothing.
One issue is the difficulty and expense of producing meltblown textile, the material that traps microscopic particles so effectively. Currently this material is in shortage, and manufacturers are reluctant to build expensive machinery to make it when the demand may not exist a year from now.
One could make a case that the government should guarantee such companies from loss, to encourage short term investment.
The government should have stepped in. We probably don't even need more N95. We could have a different kind of mask that is highly effective and made for comfort with kids and adult sizes. The government could have ordered and distributed these at cost. Then a national mask mandate is trivial. We could have greatly cut the spread and job losses. Instead they did basically nothing and said it would go away in a week or two.
Aside from the 2 Trillion or so the USGOV has provided the country in stimulus, BARDA and others have expended billions in COVID countermeasures including PPE and 600 million masks under or (or to be) manufacture(d). They await Congressional appropriations before they can expend even more.
There is plenty more that could have been done by both Congress and the executive.
However the national response from the president and the executive branch has been an abject failure on almost every front from day 1 - including testing, data collection, supply coordination and proven public health policy like mask mandates.
The Defense Production Act could have been used to marshall supplies, which were known to face shortages, in January. Instead the virus was downplayed and the act wasn't invoked until late March. Money for supplies went to ineffective and politically connected middlemen like Blue Flame Medical, who could not actually deliver supplies.
The president refused to wear a mask in public until July and continues to muddy the water about their effectiveness, stoking anti-mask sentiment (admittedly only relevant to his base). Instead ineffective treatments like hydroxychloroquine were hawked and endlessly pushed into a nonsense debate for months.
A national testing strategy implemented by executive branch agenencies, such as CDC and HSH could have had a huge impact on the spread. Instead there was no guidance or coordination of testing supplies, states are still competing with each other to purchase testing supplies.
We found out this week that HHS has tampered scientific reports and COVID data with political motivations!
Funds for supplies have hardly been the only problem here.
In context, I imagine that when the parent poster says "government" they know the reader can substitute "government" with "the legislative and executive branches of government".
Proper fit (read: the seal) is necessary for an N95 mask to do its job. So much so that 3M put out a bulletin for US customers cautioning them that fit testing is required when using KN95 masks, even if you are already fit-tested for their N95s, because the KN95 masks are designed for a flatter Asian-featured face.
The US government did step in - really early on, soon after Covid-19's existence became known, they guaranteed that they'd buy up the production of N95 masks if no-one else did in order to encourage companies to risk producing more of them even though Covid might not turn out to be a big deal. Generally, the only acknowledgement you see of this in the media is in the form of complaints that they didn't guarantee to buy up production for even longer.
The fundamental trouble is that effective masks like N95 require special melt-blown plastic in order to filter out particles whilst still allowing people to breathe through them, there's limited production capacity, and the equipment to make it has long lead times and limited production capacity itself. There's no clever way around this. For example, invoking the Defense Production Act wouldn't help despite how hard the media pushed this idea because the companies literally couldn't make any more masks, so ordering them to do so would be completely and utterly pointless. And it's not like there are other materials that work as well either.
The reason why "The market is, in fact, glutted with face shields. But the U.S. is still far short of the 3.5 billion masks that public health officials say are needed this year." is not because of a lack of central co-ordination, it's because pretty much any old manufacturer can produce face shields (people were even making them at home on small scales with 3D printers for a while) but N95 masks are really specialized things.
> For example, invoking the Defense Production Act wouldn't help despite how hard the media pushed this idea because the companies literally couldn't make any more masks, so ordering them to do so would be completely and utterly pointless.
That's not entirely true. The DPA would've allowed them to direct the existing production to where it was needed most. Instead, individual states wound up competing against each other on the open market, driving prices up and directing quite a bit of supply to places where it wasn't needed yet.
The US government did direct where the existing production went. Remember all the stories claiming that they were starving blue states of PPE for political reasons every time those states got less than they ordered? Similarly, they cracked down quite heavily on people hoarding and reselling N95 masks, which created another wave of headlines about how terrible it was that the states which were trying to buy those face masks at inflated prices didn't get their orders.
With extra fires, newly emerging awareness of how viruses actually work, and with understanding that we need stockpiles (and not just on federal level) the demand should hold pretty well. At least I hope so, because collapsing demand would mean people didn't learn anything.
masks (and lockdowns) are safety theater, for the benefit of seeming like good, caring citizens because of the high visibility of wearing a mask, when the hard work of preventing spread comes down to distancing properly even when that’s socially awkward, like at a gathering which is where mask usage also dives, because it’s private and the humans involved are overly trusting and complicit.
masks are a distraction at best, helping only at the margins when worn vigorously where distancing is not possible. we don’t need to solve a mask shortage problem, but rather the social distancing problem that masks are only marginally helpful for.
npr loves talking incessantly about masks, both as virtue signal and click getter, even in stories where its utterly, entirely irrelevant.
This study[1] from China reports on infections at one hospital in Wuhan in January.
Of 493 medical staff, 278 were in the "quarantine" area. This included the respiratory department that would have had very intimate contact with the infected. There were zero cases of SARS-Cov-2 among the staff.
Of the 213 staff from other departments that were _not_ in close, continuous contact with the infected (but also not taking infection control measures), there were 10 cases in a less than three week span.
Masks are in no way "marginally" helpful. If worn properly and used alongside other basic measures such as hand washing, they are extremely effective even in absence of social distancing measures.
This meta-study[2] compiles information on effectiveness from a dozen different studies across healthcare and non-healthcare groups. Effectiveness varies, but almost every single study shows decreased transmission with masks. Taken at aggregate among those that weren't healthcare workers, your risk of infection is halved by wearing a mask.
The CDC has repeatedly claimed that if everyone wore a mask the outbreak in the US would be under control in one to two months.
Simply social distancing does not remove the risk of infection as we've seen time and time again. The droplets don't hit some magical barrier as soon as they're 2 metres away from the source.
Masks are not virtue signalling or safety theater.
do you live in a hospital? because if not, those studies are of very limited utility to you, proving only that masks can possibly lower spread in a highly controlled environment, with no more than a suggestive hypothesis in any other scenario.
the CDC provides no plausible causal chain to believe masks by themselves would contain the outbreak.
you've provided no plausible causal chain that a falling droplet will suddenly shoot a virus particle right up your nose into that juicy bronchial mucus the virus loves, that a mask would prevent with high certainty.
in the real world, where masks are of highly varying quality and the general usage is poor at best, distancing, even modestly, does the heavy lifitng.
I think everything you've brought up here is addressed in the second link I provided.
I assume you didn't read it because they very clearly separate the studies of healthcare workers and non-healthcare workers, including at least 3 studies covering a household setting with infected living alongside uninfected.
Any of your points that aren't covered in that meta-analysis are easily addressed by other readily available literature.
I replied in good faith assuming maybe you were just unaware, but I can see now you're intentionally ignorant.
I'm not seeing anyone here talk about the actual reason that a factory owner gave: no one knows if it's going to pay off, because if this whole thing blows over (because of a vaccine, or some other treatment, or we reach herd immunity sooner than expected, etc) then they've spent a huge investment on building supply, and there's no demand for it.
Wait, I was under the impression that the spun material used to make the masks was the challenge, not the actual manufacturing of the masks. Which is actually rather simple.
My local Korean grocery store and Ace Hardware both have KN95 masks in stock for $2 to $5 a piece. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've heard of them just being available in stores elsewhere too.
> I was able to buy 20 KN95 masks for $50 through an online retailer advertising through my local business journal.
> KN95 masks are the Chinese regulatory standard vs N95 which is the NIOSH standard, but KN95 sales in the US still need FDA approval.
We bought two brands of KN95s from Taobao, and I've found they don't fit my caucasian face very well. The bend strip around the nose is too short to get a good seal.
This was earlier in the pandemic, and I believe they were off-brand ones, so they might be lower quality than others. We definitely didn't pay that much. I only consider them a marginal improvement over a surgical mask.
First of all: "the market is glutted with face masks [and hand sanitizer]." This is a massive success of the free market, mitigated only by the unfortunate fact that, as it turns out, those are not the most useful bits of PPE.
Second, contrary to the pro-price-gouging argument, the real issue is risk aversion: nobody will sign the long term contracts required for manufacturers to justify the investment (and, by the way, are functionally the same as a higher price). Why? Because providers in places where shortages actually manifest - largely poor & rural areas - are nearly bankrupt anyway. They can't guarantee payment for sh*t in the long term.
Ultimately, this issue is exactly the type of thing we need collective action for: pool our resources & buy together to defray long-term costs. Bluntly, the government should be guaranteeing these contracts. But they don't AFAIK - and that's the failing.
Because America has become destructively capitalist and if there isn't enough profit in making N95 masks, people aren't going to make them, even if it saves lives.
It's the same reason talking heads were discussing how many dead grandmas and grandpas the stock market was worth in the face of COVID-19. It's because our society cares about money more than it cares about human life.
We can blame our country's leadership all we want, but America has a culture of cruel, uncaring selfishness, and we never needed the financial incentives or the Defense Production Act to make us do the right thing: we chose not to.
Please stop posting ideological flamewar comments. It's not what HN is for, we ban accounts that do it (because it destroys what it is for), and we've had to ask you about this more than once already.
The feds seemed more interested in using the DPA as a show piece to punish CEOs like Mary Barra for acknowledging there might be a need to build ventilators. There continues to be a complete lack of acknowledgement that more masks need to be created, and so people continue to get sick and die while treating patients.
The DPA has not been used because the White House made an early decision that it was not politically necessary to raise a maximum-effort response to SARS-CoV-2. Because COVID-19 cases were primarily concentrated in Democratic states, it was seen as politically useful to do little and blame Democrats for the consequences.
> Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of
> Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest,
> a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The
> political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to
> Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be
> an effective political strategy,” said the expert.[0]
Because the Trump administration is historically corrupt and incompetent? Politics aside, it's become clear that they have absolutely no idea how to run the government. Any previous administration from any party would have done orders of magnitude better. Hell, many despotic third world regimes are doing better. They will be remembered as some of the worst fuck ups in human history.
Is anyone tracking the current spot price of N95 masks on a chart?
Would need a true price, i.e. what do you have to pay if you have no "special powers" like a hospital. Spot as close as is reasonable, maybe with 1 week delivery; I am assuming that the forward curve is still in backwardation. That would be the best tracker of shortage. The curve itself would be interesting, if it ever flips to contango without spot going meaningfully down that'd mean serious problems (nobody expects capacity increase).
From a product perspective this feels a lot like blaming the market instead of taking responsibility that you didn't build the right product. "When Gujral and other domestic manufacturers saw an opportunity to help protect frontline workers ... many of them shifted gears to make face shields and hand sanitizer, which are relatively simple to produce." Right, you built what was easy (face shields) instead of what the market wanted most (N95 masks). Now your product isn't differentiated and the market is flooded with a product that doesn't best meet the market's needs. We knew six months ago that N95 masks were the critical product for frontline workers, not listening to that market feedback isn't the federal government's fault but rather your own.
Given there has been an essentially infinite demand for any PPE, even insufficient PPE, it's very possible that producing face shields and hand sanitizer was a better business decision from a purely financial perspective. That's why the government needs to take leadership in these scenarios--market incentives often aren't enough to produce what's needed in response to large-scale disasters.
Isopropyl alcohol is still difficult to obtain in stores, which is interesting. It is insanely easy to make, unlike N95 masks, which are pretty specialized.
This was a problem in the past. Even the local gas stations and grocery stores are selling N95 masks (and KN95 masks and about thirty styles of fashion masks) here in the Midwest.
ISBE and IDPH asked us to open this school year with full in-person learning for at least up to third grade, but left us to deal with the resource shortage on our own. We scrounged for thermal scanners and face masks but the lead time on refills for our wall/stand-mounted hand sanitizer dispensers is still 26 weeks. Back in February before the US wisened up to the threat, I placed a large order that would have later qualified as “hoarding”† because I figured it was a calculated precaution worth the investment and because we are ultimately responsible for the health and safety of our students, teachers, and their families; this was sufficient for us to continue until we closed in March (of our own volition prior to the governor’s order shutting down all schools) and we had enough left over for us to reopen, but we’re basically out now. Anyone with ideas about how to procure more hand sanitizer in bulk for schools, please reach out!
† No moral qualms here because there was no insane shortage in February, because it was not for myself or for personal/corporate profit, and because it wasn’t more than we could need in a worst case scenario which absolutely materialized (reopening school in a pandemic); imho it’s not unlike a governor who placed a large order for their state - for which they would be praised as prescient and not shot down as hoarding.
Well, what’s the point of an N95 mask, when every other idiot at the supermarket wears the mask on their chin, while walking around the store talking on their cell phones?
Or they just pretend to wear it, by only covering their mouth, and leaving their noses exposed.
198 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 399 ms ] thread> President Trump consistently ignores
> Trump administration downplays
top notch "journalism"
Isn't it within the power of individual states to stimulate manufacturing of masks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
Most of the options for states would involve subsidies, which they can't really do as they can't run deficits, and are seeing tanking tax revenue.
If you mean just putting out guaranteed orders, not every state has the capacity to manufacture PPE, even fewer have money to pay for it.
One might suggest that multiple states get together and induce manufacturing in the states where they have capacity. We did that. It’s called the federal government, and it’s choosing not to utilize those powers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
This was a major point of contention at the beginning of the outbreak in the US. Governor's were lobbying the feds to invoke the act, although the administration declined to do so. The end result was that states were competing with each other for heavily inflated PPE costs. In some cases, the feds themselves were outbidding states.
https://news.wbfo.org/post/cuomo-asks-federal-defense-produc...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-...
This is "orange man bad" level
Your original post pulled the following: "Still, President Trump consistently ignores that reality." This statement in the article is then followed up with facts on the current situation. It's pretty fine journalism.
The dozens of clips circulating from March through last week where he publicly says the virus will just "disappear" are, pretty obviously, a conscious ignorance of the reality. (Since, as we've seen, warm weather nor a few months of time have stopped the pandemic.)
The only way you could even charitably say that he's not "consistently ignoring the reality" of the pandemic would be by pointing out the exceptions to those public comments -- his private, recorded comments to Woodward earlier this year where he acknowledged the deadly impact and aerosol nature of the virus.
There are tons of articles about Trump's handling of the virus with perspectives you might appreciate more; perhaps you could submit some to HN for discussion. Here are some helpful suggestions: The Daily Caller, Breitbart, and PatriotNewsEagleFreedom1776.
Speaking of 3M and N95's, can anybody with some unbiased knowledge explain what exactly is the chinese manufactured 'KN95' mask?
Are they just conveniently using the name or are the KN95 masks made to standard, to be P2/N95 grade masks?
There's a good comparison chart on page 2 of https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1791500O/comparison-ffp2....
https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1791500O/comparison-ffp2...
https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1791500O/comparison-ffp2...
Edit: there's at least "zoom" available as well. I think it takes a percentage value as parameter.
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/whats-the-difference-bet...
One thing perhaps to be concerned about (either way) is differences in the enforcement of the standard, but I don't have any solid info on that.
Without those laws, the price going from $1 per mask to $10 per mask would still be very much affordable for everyone who really needs a mask, and factories who can successfully get decent production underway will earn lots, making it worthwhile to take on the risk of chasing a (possibly short lived) demand.
In practice, I don't think $10/mast is unnaceptable. That is about 15 minutes worth of an ICU nurse's time[0]. In terms of costs that this pandemic is causing, even "expensive" masks are a cheep.
[0] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-IC...
Even the ones we get from 3M South Korea at about $20 each winds up costing just pennies per hour.
Re-use Guidelines: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/ppe-strategy/d...
How have you found reuse to effect fit and performance?
From the CDC page you linked:
"Decontamination of an N95 FFR inactivates viruses and bacteria on the device, but does not restore the N95 FFR to “new” performance. Decontamination studies have evaluated the effect of the decontamination process on the fit and filtration performance of N95 FFRs; however, these studies did not consider the likelihood that N95 FFRs worn by healthcare personnel are likely donned and doffed multiple times before undergoing decontamination. N95 FFR performance will decrease as the number of hours and number of donnings and doffings increase. Repeated decontamination and handling of FFRs can damage the fit and filtration performance of N95 FFRs. Fit performance during limited reuse, including decontaminated FFRs, should be monitored by the respiratory protection program manager or appropriate safety personnel. Information about how to assess N95 FFR fit during limited reuse can be found below...."
We store them in paper bags to let them dry out.
Given we rarely actually have to go out of our home offices, it works well. 20 resperatore lasts about three months per person.
If you need more - you can get 3M N95 from South Korea - about $200 for twenty.
Let’s say it takes 5 years to recoup that initial investment to procure materials and manufacture masks at current pricing. Most experts agree the pandemic will have run its course within a year or two. So common sense says getting into the mask business where it will take 5 years to recoup your losses is a bad bet.
But if pricing was allowed to follow demand, there is more incentive for aspiring mask manufacturers to take those risks. Maybe the cost to ramp up production can be covered in a couple of years or maybe even a couple of months. That mitigates risk and given opportunity like that, existing mask manufacturers will be better incentivized to scale their production more rapidly. And then more masks get produced quickly, scarcity decreases, and pricing eventually finds equilibrium again.
But because we don’t allow “gouging” (whether for legal or social reasons), the mask shortage will continue until existing manufacturers can produce enough to meet demand. And some people that need PPE won’t have it easily available until then, but we will feel awfully good about making sure nobody got gouged. After all, nobody gets gouged if there is nothing to buy.
Yes, obviously - what did you think deficit spending was? But the point is the cost of fiscal expenditure is lower than it has been in the past, and it seems like we have a really useful thing we could be spending it on.
To me, it seems like normal "propensity to consume + ability to pay" style distribution of masks won't help that much in a pandemic that disproportionately spreads among the poor and where the more people wearing the mask, the better.
As Friedman famously asked - who are the angels that are supposed to make these wise, unbiased decisions on our behalf?
Ah yes, as opposed to the rational private market of large capital investments to create new industries, which is apolitical and has no cronyism /s (never mind no price incentive to massively invest in large-scale manufacturing for a temporary pandemic)
I do not think it even remotely holds in the illiquid limit of massive-scale private capital investment markets. I would rather that power be wielded by actors exercising public power shaped by institutional constraints than by private actors who can wield it in an arbitrary manner, particularly in the context of a pandemic where there is a huge societal difference between 10 $10 masks and 100 $1 ones.
Governments that are democratically accountable to the people are far more likely to create outcomes that support collective social needs than are business owners who are accountable to no one.
The fact that the United States does such a poor job of this is an indictment of poor governance, and lack of democratic accountability, than a weakness of the principle of government in general. Other countries do far better at this--note the universal availability of rated masks in places like Korea and Japan from day one of the pandemic--and there is a reason the US is ranked 22nd, and falling, for public corruption.[0]
[0] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2018/results/usa
Artificially cheap prices also encourage hoarding and opportunistic buying by those willing to sell on the black market. And that just compounds the problem.
So while your desire to prevent gouging is admirable, it is also counterproductive.
Are you citing any data for this or are you just assuming this will happen? In my experience when production equals demand everyone continues selling at the ridiculously high prices for months. In a pandemic like this one that's months of watching the death toll climb.
There is a very real cost of sticking to a free market ideology when people are dying.
And to address your alarmism: if people are dying, it's safe to assume that a lack of PPE contributes to that. And people don't have PPE because the free market isn't being allowed to produce it. That's the point.
I'm not the one "sticking" to an ideology.
[EDIT] To be more specific here. Price gouging laws apply to retailers, not manufacturers. Price gouging basically covers retailers hording supply to artificially inflate the price during an emergency. That's not what's going on here. Manufacturers don't have capacity to meet demand. They are free to adjust the price in response.
That can cut both ways: the possibility of "price gouging" can also encourage speculation, both for those hoping to turn a profit and for those who over-buy compared to expected use to ensure price stability.
Our local grocery chain had a quota on milk (for good reason) and the amount of fights and nearly brawls over it were amazing, despite being a need for some families and not others (it's inconvenient to me to not have cereal, it's a big deal for someone with young kids to not have milk) and generally reasonable limits (up to 2 gallons, more than enough for cereal/coffee/baking).
People go to crazy limits to evade the quotas (visiting multiple stores, making multiple purchases in the same trip, etc) and often times they do simply because the quota exists - how many people actually buy more than 2 gallons of milk normally?
TLDR, people are dumb fearful animals and that can cause quotas to backfire in a way that price controls don't (but they have other downsides).
That's not true, you just have to design them properly. For instance: 3M knows its customers, and can decide give retail hardware stores an N95 quota of zero and hospital systems large quotas, roughly based on need. Those organizations aren't going to get into slap fights in an aisle.
> Our local grocery chain had a quota on milk (for good reason) and the amount of fights and nearly brawls over it were amazing
An unsourced anecdote about a failure of an unspecified retail quota system is not good evidence against emergency quotas in general. It might not even be accurate.
> People go to crazy limits to evade the quotas (visiting multiple stores, making multiple purchases in the same trip, etc) and often times they do simply because the quota exists - how many people actually buy more than 2 gallons of milk normally?
IMHO, the main goal of loosely-enforced retail quotas like those is not so much to strictly limit people to the quota, but to increase friction to frustrate hoarders and profiteers.
See, this is a problem. Idiots/scalpers/resellers/paranoids raiding hardware stores for masks is terrible, but construction was considered an essential business country-wide and never halted meaning you still had minimum wage day laborers (not to mention unionized construction workers making well over that) working in environments N95 masks were designed for that had no access to PPE but still needed to report for work because they need to put food on the table and don’t legally qualify for unemployment (since the jobs are there and they’re not being fired/laid off).
IMHO, most N95s on retail shelves probably wouldn't have gone to construction workers anyway; they'd have been snatched up by consumers with no real need. I do think it would have been reasonable allocate a quota to to go to construction supply companies that weren't open to the general public, though, for precisely the reasons you outlined.
This story is pretty interesting, construction workers/companies are having to make similar kinds of adaptations to the shortage as healthcare workers are:
https://www.inquirer.com/real-estate/coronavirus-constructio...
> To combat supply shortages, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has temporarily adjusted some of its requirements for both health-care and construction workers, including allowing them to wear N95 respirator masks for longer than their intended use — normally a day or two for construction workers — and to use other types of respirators, such as KN95s shipped from China....
> OSHA is advising employers to reduce the need for N95 masks at jobsites any way they can, a Department of Labor spokesperson said. The National Association of Home Builders advises those who can’t find masks to minimize dust by vacuuming and wet cutting.
The article even talked about construction companies and unions donating their existing mask stockpiles.
We certainly do. At least six gallons at a time, because my time is money (and mostly because grocery shopping is a chore) and I don’t want to make repeated trips to the grocery store when I don’t have to. I calculate the consumption rate for adults, babies, and toddlers in the house and based off the expiration date and my own experimental findings (based largely off of fridge temperature and brand of milk as a proxy for homogenization method/temperature/duration) I get the maximum I can without it spoiling, which happened just once due to a bad batch that must have been stored wrong in shipping because it spoiled before even the sell by date.
Capitalism isn't effective at distributing by need, only by ability to pay.
Nailed it. Yep. Building a massive production line with complex equipment and training only to be bankrupt in 6 months is a fools errand. The is why we have a government - when we need something that capitalism cannot supply. But they wont, so we don't.
Not if they can make all of their money back in 6 months via extreme prices. However we are past the "extreme prices" phase of the pandemic.
> Not if they can make all of their money back in 6 months via extreme prices. However we are past the "extreme prices" phase of the pandemic.
But to do that, you'd have to bring the new production capacity online on day 1, which is unrealistic. The timelines just don't make sense. New factories don't just pop into existence; it take time to build them and bring them online.
The main thing that would actually happen if price gouging was allowed is that parasitic middlemen would drive up the prices of existing stock by flipping it (making only a personal profit and doing no social good). Existing manufacturers might do that too, if they're not concerned with losing goodwill by pissing off their current customers.
In this case, government is actually preventing capitalism from being tried. But you see that as capitalism has failed and only government can save us.
teachers and many essential workers who need masks the most are also most vulnerable to unexpected expenses like PPE costs. and the organizations they work for typically have strict budges and can usually only provide limited supplies.
that statement feels wildly out of touch.
My district had to double its busing budget this year due to restrictions on the number of students that could be on each bus. This led to even further cuts into the classroom budgets.
So, I guess your experience may be different.
Except, they aren’t spending that much now because they aren’t bringing the kids to school. Why would the teachers need masks?
My district is bringing half the students to school each day, with a different half on different days. But they still drive the buses the same distance, and still need the same number of drivers.
We have made other mandated changes which have been vastly more expensive.
Friend owns a textile factory in India. They immediately began production of masks, which they sold at something like a 10,000% premium. (Re-tooling is expensive, so their profits weren’t exorbitant. Though they were larger than normal, which incentivises the work.) Once the premium diminished, they went back to making clothes.
India has anti-gouging laws. But they are loosely enforced to the point of non-existence. In America, we not only have such laws, we also have a media circus and cancel subculture that strongly discourages such responses.
Case in point: there was a great piece a while back about a domestic mask manufacturer who ramped up production for the H1N1 outbreak only to see demand collapse when the pandemic turned out to be far less severe than expected [1]. They almost went out of business because there was no where to sell their masks at a profit and had to unwind most of their operations.
The solution here is for the federal government to backstop the orders. If no buyer can be found at price $x / mask, then the government will buy them and put them into the national stockpiles for the future.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/surreal-frenzy-inside-us-biggest...
While theoretically price gauging is an incentive to increase production, if that's all you're thinking about, you're dealing with a toy model that has little connection to the real world. Toy models can be super compelling and elegant, but that doesn't make them reality. You have to deal with other factors, like
* The influence of parasitic middlemen only looking to flip goods and drive up the price for quick personal profit. In most of these cases, the period of increased demand is so short this is the only effect you'll see, since there's no time to bring new capacity online, but you have all the downsides of increased prices.
* Does price gouging actually direct the scarce resource to where it's needed? Markets often are very irrational, so this can't reasonably be assumed (e.g. during a famine, the market would direct food to the rich and well-fed even if they just were going to waste it on opulent banquets, because they have the money to pay the price).
* People are actually motivated by things other than greed, even though models of behavior are simplified by assuming greed is their only (or main) motivation.
* New production will come online to meet demand, even without price gouging. How much more production would price gouging motivate? Is that production worth the social cost?
* You can't build a sustainable greed-motivated business on building factories to price-gouge. A brand new market entrant is likely to have a pretty poor product compared to established players, and will likely go bankrupt once demand returns to normal. They might not even get their product out the door in time to take advantage of the high prices. It could be a predictable case of "buy high, sell low."
* New techniques will be developed to more efficiently use current production, which may pull the rug out from under anyone who made a heavy capital investment based on the surge demand.
* Etc.
> Without those laws, the price going from $1 per mask to $10 per mask would still be very much affordable for everyone who really needs a mask, and factories who can successfully get decent production underway will earn lots, making it worthwhile to take on the risk of chasing a (possibly short lived) demand.
IIRC, the price gougers drive up the price even higher than $10.
What i've just said obviously over-simplifies and in some large respects does a dis-service to capitalism BUT i still can't help but feel we need an improvement. It's not good enough yet.
Despite a lack of DPA measures and the existence of anti-price gouging laws, masks remain readily available. For example, asimpleshop.com (made by a fellow HN user) has masks ready for a reasonable price. The fact that everyone does not have access to good KN95 masks comes from a national lack of will, not a lack of national resources.
Pay ten bucks per mask - and soon enough in every basement there will be a masks factory.
At least until OSHA comes after them.
These masks are disposable. They should be disposed of properly, but throwing them away isn't the cause of supply problems.
Thus, the maximum length of continuous use in non-dusty healthcare workplaces is typically dictated by hygienic concerns (e.g., the respirator was discarded because it became contaminated) or practical considerations (e.g., need to use the restroom, meal breaks, etc.), rather than a pre-determined number of hours.
Extended use alone is unlikely to degrade respiratory protection.
If no manufacturer guidance is available, preliminary data(19, 20) suggests limiting the number of reuses to no more than five uses per device to ensure an adequate safety margin.
The most significant risk is of contact transmission from touching the surface of the contaminated respirator.
Basically, the major risk factors for extended use and reuse is contamination of the respirator resulting in infection from handling it and damage rendering the respirator inferior (e.g. due to improper seal). Also, these guidelines are for clinical settings where these specific risk factors significantly elevated. For a normal person who uses the mask maybe once per week (assuming they are rotating), a single n95 mask could last quite a long time.
> Extended use refers to the practice of wearing the same N95 respirator for repeated close contact encounters with several patients, without removing the respirator between patient encounters.
You're reading it as "extended use" meaning multi-day use, but that's not what the article defines it as. You will eventually have to discard the thing as it gets soiled or becomes harder to breathe through as it collects particles.
If you read the linked papers, the reuse guidance is over the course of days with rest periods in between.
Also, you don't usually find N95 masks littering the streets. These are usually just surgical or cloth masks, and they are not really worth reusing.
This article is about N95 masks, which are mostly used by doctors and nurses.
If you’re not a reliable partner how can you expect people to invest? If someone builds a factory in the US, as soon as masks are available from China again the administration will just drop them like a rock and start ordering from China for rock bottom prices again.
He said he wasn't expanding or making his people pull overtime only for hospitals to go to China.
How much was the cost difference? 10 cents versus 4 cents per mask.
You also might pay $5 for a hot dog at a stadium when you can buy them for $1 outside, so there's that.
Is that why the concession sales at the stadiums are hurting?
NYC had street vendors selling legitimate masks bought for example via supplier that normally would be selling to Home Depot, except home depot decided to do its patriotic duty ( i was amazed when they announced it ) and stopped selling N95 masks all together.
For example this is the stuff from a qualified vendor today:
https://nypost.com/2020/09/12/principals-rip-nyc-doe-for-sup...
If there was accountability and an actual, real probability of collecting on judgements internationally, I'd have no problem with globalization. The reality is unless you are a deep-pocketed (absolute minimum 7th exponent club) actor, odds of actually getting all the way through the other side of collections are less than slim. It's still bad odds when sourcing with an "isolationist" bias, but you can knock a couple exponents off, and I'll take order of magnitude differentials all day long.
If there was a way to secure non-gamed reviews, then I'd be much more open to globalization-produced goods, but I haven't found that yet. My current rough proxy for quality is to source commercial-rated duty cycle goods if they are available, research on trades discussion forums for discussion about the manufacturer, and work up an evaluation from there. But that's really time-consuming. No way do I now "trust the market" to shake out shady players.
If you want to "save money", then go ask the Chinese factories to sell you the masks now.
Here's the link:
> This is a cycle familiar to Bowen. During what he calls "peacetime," when there are no outbreaks, there are few buyers of masks. During an epidemic, there's suddenly limitless demand.
> "Imagine if, all at once, millions of people wanted to skateboard," Bowen says. "The skateboarding industry is not set up for spikes like that, and neither is the mask-making industry."
> Prestige Ameritech, for example, owns a limited number of machines that assemble, sew and shape the masks. A decade ago, it ramped up production in response to the swine flu outbreak by buying more machines and hiring 150 new workers.
> "We made a really big mistake," Bowen says of that decision. It took about four months to build the new machines, which are as long as a school bus and cost as much as $1 million.
> By the time they were ready, the swine flu crisis had ended, demand vaporized, and Prestige Ameritech almost went bankrupt. "One day — and it is literally almost like one day — it just quits. The demand is over, the phones stop ringing," Bowen says.
> To make matters worse, the hospitals and medical supply companies suddenly had a glut of masks; they stopped buying for months.
If I promise to buy a car from you for $100,000, and you spend $10,000 to make it, and I discover I don't need the car anymore, in most cases, I can walk away paying you $10,000. If you continued doing unneeded work, that'd be bad economics. If you could rake me over the coals and ask to me to pay $50k, that'd be exploitative. In most cases, the outcome of a broken contract is that I try to set things right for you by either:
* Paying you costs incurred
* Paying you expected profits
* Or similar.
Courts calculate damages by a range of formulas, which then sets standards for how business is conducted, and in most cases, people don't go to court but just agree to pay damages.
This is foreign to how most people think about agreements; it's a very different culture. But if you talk to lawyers or executives, that's how they reason about contracts.
In the case with Phillips, they already delivered 1/4th of the ventilators, there are reports all over the place stating that these were overpaid for. Of course the government overpaid for these. They were in a situation were they had to. Phillips even made indications in their earnings reports that these are contributing significant profit.
These manufacturers would not hesitate to enter one of these contracts again in the future.
Someone should investigate how it came to be that anesthetizing COVID-19 patients and sticking a tube into their lungs was the standard treatment, until the front-line medical teams rebelled. [1]
[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/Ventilators-aren-t-a-pan...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...
You're suggesting the government should spend $650 Million in tax payer money for something that is unnecessary and comparing it to the mask shortage? You're comparing apples and oranges trying to push your orange man bad narrative unncecessarily. 3M and a few other companies produce N95 masks stateside.
>>On Jan. 30, the last day for which data is available, China managed to import 20 million respirators and surgical masks in just 24 hours. Through February, civic-minded entrepreneurs and aid groups visited pharmacies in affluent countries and emerging markets alike, buying masks in bulk to send to China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/business/masks-china-coro...
>“It’s very unusual to have a contract like this canceled,”
noting that Philips reducing their FY profit outlook as a result, to help investors make an decision on their investments.
It's also very unusual for the government to give a company $650M dollar contract so quickly. It's obvious they wanted Philips, who was clearly perceived to be a leader in the space, to ramp up supply expecting a massive surge demand, which did not materialize. A business decision was made to cut the contract that was no longer needed.
You're welcome to try and go against the client to recover "damages" and risk future contracts from said client.
I love a good threat.
Philips getting screwed - yeah, not going to be doing business with the govt in the future. We wonder why folks are reluctant to respond to govt directives, because the govt is schizophrenic about this stuff.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/politics/defense-produ...
The govt is welcome to pre-pay next time it needs something urgently.
Yes, because next time we beg a company to ramp up production of something, it might wind up being necessary.
There's a benefit to government taking on some of the risk in these sorts of scenarios.
I don't think it was hysteria in the media, it was the belief early on by the medical field that respirators were the best treatment for COVID patients.
I'd like to think that the government bought those respirators due to medical demand, not because what they read in the newspaper.
Indeed, it's a no-brainer decision. The expected ROI of a $1 billion ventilator order in April was astronomically high.
Conversely, cancelling the contract makes sense too, now that ventilators don't seem to be the solution. Generally, when a contract is cancelled, you pay for costs already incurred, so it's generally not unfair to do so.
3M and Honeywell are responding to HHS and DoD contracts by double or tripling their monthly output (admittedly, most of their factories are outside the U.S., in China and other places).
According to Statistica, monthly production of these masks will rise from 45 million units in January 2020 to 180 million units by end of year. Maybe this is insufficient but it's certainly better than nothing.
One issue is the difficulty and expense of producing meltblown textile, the material that traps microscopic particles so effectively. Currently this material is in shortage, and manufacturers are reluctant to build expensive machinery to make it when the demand may not exist a year from now.
One could make a case that the government should guarantee such companies from loss, to encourage short term investment.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1135072/us-n95-mask-prod...
2. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2020-09-10/sca...
3. https://news.yahoo.com/dr-ger-increases-n95-respiratory-1555...
https://www.phe.gov/emergency/events/COVID19/SNS/Pages/procu...
Aside from the 2 Trillion or so the USGOV has provided the country in stimulus, BARDA and others have expended billions in COVID countermeasures including PPE and 600 million masks under or (or to be) manufacture(d). They await Congressional appropriations before they can expend even more.
https://www.phe.gov/emergency/events/COVID19/Pages/default.a...
POTUS power to allocate money comes from CONGRESS, so when you say 'Government' you're saying almost nothing.
However the national response from the president and the executive branch has been an abject failure on almost every front from day 1 - including testing, data collection, supply coordination and proven public health policy like mask mandates.
The Defense Production Act could have been used to marshall supplies, which were known to face shortages, in January. Instead the virus was downplayed and the act wasn't invoked until late March. Money for supplies went to ineffective and politically connected middlemen like Blue Flame Medical, who could not actually deliver supplies.
The president refused to wear a mask in public until July and continues to muddy the water about their effectiveness, stoking anti-mask sentiment (admittedly only relevant to his base). Instead ineffective treatments like hydroxychloroquine were hawked and endlessly pushed into a nonsense debate for months.
A national testing strategy implemented by executive branch agenencies, such as CDC and HSH could have had a huge impact on the spread. Instead there was no guidance or coordination of testing supplies, states are still competing with each other to purchase testing supplies.
We found out this week that HHS has tampered scientific reports and COVID data with political motivations!
Funds for supplies have hardly been the only problem here.
The seal isn't quite as good as a proper N95, but it beat surgical, and even surgical gets you almost all the way there.
The [CDC tested them](https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/respirators/testing/results/...) and their quality control leaves a lot to be desired.
If the variance for just 10 masks was so incredibly high, who knows how crappy the 99th percentile mask they produce is?
after that any mask would help with appropriate behavior, which requires nothing but political quality
The fundamental trouble is that effective masks like N95 require special melt-blown plastic in order to filter out particles whilst still allowing people to breathe through them, there's limited production capacity, and the equipment to make it has long lead times and limited production capacity itself. There's no clever way around this. For example, invoking the Defense Production Act wouldn't help despite how hard the media pushed this idea because the companies literally couldn't make any more masks, so ordering them to do so would be completely and utterly pointless. And it's not like there are other materials that work as well either.
The reason why "The market is, in fact, glutted with face shields. But the U.S. is still far short of the 3.5 billion masks that public health officials say are needed this year." is not because of a lack of central co-ordination, it's because pretty much any old manufacturer can produce face shields (people were even making them at home on small scales with 3D printers for a while) but N95 masks are really specialized things.
That's not entirely true. The DPA would've allowed them to direct the existing production to where it was needed most. Instead, individual states wound up competing against each other on the open market, driving prices up and directing quite a bit of supply to places where it wasn't needed yet.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2020-04-07/...
Only partially, in the least coordinated of fashions, and while simultaneously telling states to DIY it. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/19/trump-governors-cor...
With extra fires, newly emerging awareness of how viruses actually work, and with understanding that we need stockpiles (and not just on federal level) the demand should hold pretty well. At least I hope so, because collapsing demand would mean people didn't learn anything.
masks are a distraction at best, helping only at the margins when worn vigorously where distancing is not possible. we don’t need to solve a mask shortage problem, but rather the social distancing problem that masks are only marginally helpful for.
npr loves talking incessantly about masks, both as virtue signal and click getter, even in stories where its utterly, entirely irrelevant.
Wat.
This study[1] from China reports on infections at one hospital in Wuhan in January.
Of 493 medical staff, 278 were in the "quarantine" area. This included the respiratory department that would have had very intimate contact with the infected. There were zero cases of SARS-Cov-2 among the staff.
Of the 213 staff from other departments that were _not_ in close, continuous contact with the infected (but also not taking infection control measures), there were 10 cases in a less than three week span.
Masks are in no way "marginally" helpful. If worn properly and used alongside other basic measures such as hand washing, they are extremely effective even in absence of social distancing measures.
This meta-study[2] compiles information on effectiveness from a dozen different studies across healthcare and non-healthcare groups. Effectiveness varies, but almost every single study shows decreased transmission with masks. Taken at aggregate among those that weren't healthcare workers, your risk of infection is halved by wearing a mask.
The CDC has repeatedly claimed that if everyone wore a mask the outbreak in the US would be under control in one to two months.
Simply social distancing does not remove the risk of infection as we've seen time and time again. The droplets don't hit some magical barrier as soon as they're 2 metres away from the source.
Masks are not virtue signalling or safety theater.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7134426/ [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7253999/
the CDC provides no plausible causal chain to believe masks by themselves would contain the outbreak.
you've provided no plausible causal chain that a falling droplet will suddenly shoot a virus particle right up your nose into that juicy bronchial mucus the virus loves, that a mask would prevent with high certainty.
in the real world, where masks are of highly varying quality and the general usage is poor at best, distancing, even modestly, does the heavy lifitng.
I assume you didn't read it because they very clearly separate the studies of healthcare workers and non-healthcare workers, including at least 3 studies covering a household setting with infected living alongside uninfected.
Any of your points that aren't covered in that meta-analysis are easily addressed by other readily available literature.
I replied in good faith assuming maybe you were just unaware, but I can see now you're intentionally ignorant.
I'm out. Have a nice day.
They are relatively easy to manufacture, but what we really needed was mass-production of N95/KN95 masks for essential workers.
KN95 masks are the Chinese regulatory standard vs N95 which is the NIOSH standard, but KN95 sales in the US still need FDA approval.
Here is a list of approved masks from the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-disease-2019...
Only for use in healthcare settings. The FDA doesn't have regulatory authority over masks and respirators for non-medical uses.
> KN95 masks are the Chinese regulatory standard vs N95 which is the NIOSH standard, but KN95 sales in the US still need FDA approval.
We bought two brands of KN95s from Taobao, and I've found they don't fit my caucasian face very well. The bend strip around the nose is too short to get a good seal.
This was earlier in the pandemic, and I believe they were off-brand ones, so they might be lower quality than others. We definitely didn't pay that much. I only consider them a marginal improvement over a surgical mask.
Second, contrary to the pro-price-gouging argument, the real issue is risk aversion: nobody will sign the long term contracts required for manufacturers to justify the investment (and, by the way, are functionally the same as a higher price). Why? Because providers in places where shortages actually manifest - largely poor & rural areas - are nearly bankrupt anyway. They can't guarantee payment for sh*t in the long term.
Ultimately, this issue is exactly the type of thing we need collective action for: pool our resources & buy together to defray long-term costs. Bluntly, the government should be guaranteeing these contracts. But they don't AFAIK - and that's the failing.
What are the most useful bits of PPE against an airborne (breathed, not sneezed/touched) virus?
Others are still useful (gowns, faceshields, sanitizer, etc.), but masks are the most useful, from what I can tell.
It's the same reason talking heads were discussing how many dead grandmas and grandpas the stock market was worth in the face of COVID-19. It's because our society cares about money more than it cares about human life.
We can blame our country's leadership all we want, but America has a culture of cruel, uncaring selfishness, and we never needed the financial incentives or the Defense Production Act to make us do the right thing: we chose not to.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
With the right declaration, the feds can make any American company manufacture anything. Why haven't they used it for N95's?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act
> Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of
> Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest,
> a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The
> political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to
> Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be
> an effective political strategy,” said the expert.[0]
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-s...
Would need a true price, i.e. what do you have to pay if you have no "special powers" like a hospital. Spot as close as is reasonable, maybe with 1 week delivery; I am assuming that the forward curve is still in backwardation. That would be the best tracker of shortage. The curve itself would be interesting, if it ever flips to contango without spot going meaningfully down that'd mean serious problems (nobody expects capacity increase).
† No moral qualms here because there was no insane shortage in February, because it was not for myself or for personal/corporate profit, and because it wasn’t more than we could need in a worst case scenario which absolutely materialized (reopening school in a pandemic); imho it’s not unlike a governor who placed a large order for their state - for which they would be praised as prescient and not shot down as hoarding.
Or they just pretend to wear it, by only covering their mouth, and leaving their noses exposed.
Regardless, this issue does not fix stupidity.