4 ms·

Stockpiling is good as part of the preparation but isn't enough. e.g. "Five months worth of supplies were used by one hospital in six days" [1] How's any coun

• lazyjones 7y ago
  > e.g. "Five months worth of supplies were used by one hospital in six days" [1] Here in Austria we don't even have enough N95 masks for hospital staff and medical personnel. This is completely irresponsible and not impossible to fix. It should be part of any pandemic plan to stockpile these. Things would work much better if at least this was covered now, but sadly it isn't and people will die because of it.
  • piokoch 7y ago
    Stockpile how? This is typical niche product, nobody assumes this will be needed in huge quantities. There was a post on HN about how difficult is to produce those masks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22613061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22613061) and that setting up assembly line for needed materials takes 6 months (6 months in Germany, who are already producing this stuff).
• yourapostasy 7y ago
  Once you go down this analysis rabbit hole, I believe the rational conclusion is to "stockpile" manufacturing capacity by keeping manufacturing under physical domestic control. Otherwise you're always fighting the last war. Today it is a respiratory-oriented weakness in our supply chain. Tomorrow it could be fungal spores; do we have enough domestic manufacturing capacity to create fungicides at pandemic scale? Another mitigation option is standardized international cooperation and automated data interchange on international acute public health matters when an issue rises to just the regional level. Improving the level of integrated data sharing in this age of data mining would accelerate research and development of responses. I was hopeful that a standardized data representation format already existed, and highly-granular patient data from around the world would be available to the entire public (not just institutions) to sift through. Instead, we're still exchanging data through papers. The source code and raw data of models or clinical trial analyses are not published. We do have genome sequences available publicly, which helps, though.
• olejorgenb 7y ago
  I've seen this a couple of places, but no-one has explained why the masks expire? Also - it should be possible to design simple protocols to rotate the stock properly. Storage costs due to increased space is unavoidable ofc.
  • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Like most non-organic things masks "expire" because the manufacture needs to not be liable after a certain date (after all, the manufacturer can't be realistically held responsible indefinitely) and the institutions buying the masks are unwilling to take on the responsibility of determining the quality of their own stockpile so they just trash them and buy more. The military actively researches this kind of thing and knows exactly how long past it's expiration date many products are good for. I'm unaware of any other organizations that take on this responsibility.
  • ckcheng 7y ago
    I found: "Over time, components such as the straps and nose bridge material may degrade, which can affect the quality of the fit and seal" [1] Also, some filters are constructed from charged fibers and electrostatic attraction helps in the filtering [2]. I wonder if that electrostatic attraction can be lost in some way, which would help explain the expiry date. Anyway, [1] also says using expired masks may be considered in a crisis, best for training and fit testing though. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirators-strategy/crisis-alternate-strategies.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirators-st... [2] https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2009/10/14/n95/ https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2009/10/14/n95/