5 ms·

To all who are wondering why Facebook had masks - “To help, Facebook donated our emergency reserve of 720,000 masks that we had bought in case the wildfires co

by Aloha 7y ago

To all who are wondering why Facebook had masks - “To help, Facebook donated our emergency reserve of 720,000 masks that we had bought in case the wildfires continued,”

epistasis 7y ago
Which is enough for 14 days for ~50,000 people at 1/day. It seems like huge overkill when stated as a single number, but two weeks is a reasonable amount to plan for, especially for reserves at a time when the supply chain is stressed. I wish our hospitals' administration had as much foresight. I think this crisis is making it clear that management in health care is vastly overpaid.
- nullc 7y ago
  If you're wearing an n95 mask for particulate pollution there isn't a particular reason why you can't reuse it. When I heard the numbers, I figured they purchased extra so they could also supply them to the surrounding community so as to avoid drama about facebook employees having masks while few others did.
  - abakker 7y ago
    I mean, they're good for 8-10 hours, but they don't last indefinitely.
    - DecoPerson 7y ago
      As far as I’ve heard, this is what the label recommends; however, in practice, they can be used for much longer. (I cannot remember my sources, sorry.)
    - hammock 7y ago
      Wore mine for 2 weeks during the fires when they were in short supply. It was definitely worse for wear at the end. And mine didn't have a valve on it. If it did, it might have lasted longer.
    - vmh1928 7y ago
      I used to mow 1/2 acre of Bermuda grass at least once a week from May - October on a riding mower. Would take 2 1/2 hours. I used the n95's you get at Home Depot and would reuse them for many weeks and probably could have continued to reuse them until I couldn't breath through them or the straps broke. They're for stopping particulates so as long as they're not clogged they still work. If the particulates are infectious virus particles then reuse becomes more problematic but they still filter particles.
    - abakker 7y ago
      Self reply to all others: try doing something that actually tests the limits a bit for health reasons. you can tell in a welding/woodshop when N95s and P100s go bad, they get physically harder to breath through after about 6-8 hours. If they don't they're not sealed well enough. they do keep working longer (probably), but they get quite a bit worse.
      - scarejunba 7y ago
        Doesn't really apply to the situation being discussed. You can absolutely wear it for two weeks during the fires. It will work just fine even well sealed. Not sufficient particulate matter in the air to be significant blocker.
    - oliwarner 7y ago
      The filtration doesn't run out when working with particulates, it actually gets better. The reason you have to replace them is they get too good at filtering and it restricts natural breath (or they get damaged). In this situation, you assume the mask catches particles containing coronavirus. The mask becomes a biohazard pretty quickly. They could probably be safely disinfected and reused.
- nprz 7y ago
  It truly is insane how quickly the severity of the crisis ramped up. Monday co-workers on slack were messaging how the flu was more of a worry, after Wednesday it was mandatory work from home. And it truly feels like medical authorities were as caught off guard as the rest of us. Who was on guard duty? Was no one monitoring the situation? No one thought to increase production of PPE or RNA tests?
  - epistasis 7y ago
    Being as apolitical as possible, the fault is 100% Trump's. Our pandemic response team was gutted in Spring 2018. One of my favorite science journalists, Ed Yong, wrote this shortly after; there's a lot of contextual history before he starts spitting fire at the president's egotistic idiocy. > Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable—and in some respects is becoming quickly more so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even key items are made to order. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-the-next-plague-hits/561734/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-th... ^ this is our current system. The people that would have been responsible for activating production had been fired. The CDC bungled the first tests. The FDA prevented anybody but the CDC from performing tests until just recently. The FDA tried to stop the Seattle Flu Study from back testing their samples to find evidence of infections; the scientists defied the FDA and found early evidence that would not have been found earlier. Here's Trump responding to a reporter asking about the risks of firing the pandemic response team, back in 2018: https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/1239920268979646467?s=21 https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/123992026897964646... He later denied any knowledge of doing this. And instead of hiring back the people, he called the virus a Democrat hoax. Only later did he even pay attention to it, but there are debates about whether the VP he said was in charge, or his son-in-law is actually in charge. Nobody knows what is going on, every press conference is filled with basic inaccuracies, and he ignores the science. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explains-why-he-doesnt-correct-trump-during-press-conferences/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explain... It's rotten from the top. We have robbed our government from essential functions, not to really save any money, but because we have an executive that doesn't know what he is doing and is too narcissistic to let anybody stick around that might reveal his inferiority complex. Politicians that know better keep silent for fear of angering this president. This is not a partisan statement, this is a statement of the fundamental distinction of having a bad leader. No corporation would survive like this. For the federal government, which is several orders of magnitude more complex than any corporation, we are absolutely devastated by having such terrible executive leadership. People need to start speaking up and realizing that we must drop the partisanship in order for our country to remain a leader in science and economic power. It took climate scientistS more than a decade to realize that being apolitical meant that the science would be politicized by monied interests; anybody who is interested in truth and science should realize that we must now mobilize against a political force with so large a lust for power that it will acknowledge no external authority, no truth, no empirical reality. These are strange times.
- KarlKemp 7y ago
  Hospitals only get paid for actually treating people. Many of them have asked for financing for disaster preparation, but nobody was willing to pay for it.
- jb775 7y ago
  And it makes you wonder how exactly healthcare $$$ is flowing through the supply chain. It obviously isn't tied up in equipment inventory or logistics management. Time to shake the healthcare-costs tree and see what falls out!
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    I believe the healthcare system is so bloated because of a lack of competition. It made news when Trump pushed for legislation that would force hospitals to tell you how much they cost. Think about that. Setting aside all the arguments that it shouldn't be left up to the free market at all, in what world can a marketplace be healthy without something so basic as price disclosure?
    - jb775 7y ago
      Good point, I know that healthcare price disclosure is legally required in Australia. I wonder how the systems compare. If you trace through the hospital's costs, it seems like a bulk of healthcare money ends up in the pockets of medical device companies. In my opinion, it doesn't seem like competition is behaving naturally at that level either. It seems like these companies are using the healthcare flustercluck as a proxy for anti-competitive behavior.
- slg 7y ago
  >I wish our hospitals' administration had as much foresight. I think this crisis is making it clear that management in health care is vastly overpaid. Facebook has just a tad bit more money to prepare for these remote possibilities compared with your average hospital. Plus hospitals have to justify every cost in relation to how many lives it will save. Is prepping for a once in a century pandemic going to save more lives than having an extra doctor on staff for every shift? Almost everyone would have answered no to that questions up until a few weeks or months ago.
  - mygo 7y ago
    This isn’t a remote possibility. The California wildfires were real. People were wearing N95 masks last year due to the wildfires. There was even a famous article about a couple who had their engagement pictures taken wearing N95 masks due to the california wildfires, which you could see in the background of the photos. And since global warming is actually a real thing, we could project more wildfires for this year. It isn’t a “remote” possibility that facebook employees end up needing respirators since it isn’t a “remote” possibility that there will be wildfires again in California this year. That is what is expected to happen. Although it’s hard to tell what will be the impact of the global shut-downs reducing greenhouse gases on global temperatures this summer (if that will even have any impact so soon).
    - slg 7y ago
      You focused on the wrong end of my comment. I was defending the choices of the hospitals and not criticizing the choices of Facebook.
      - mygo 7y ago
        My apologies. Misunderstood your statement. I would still say that having stockpiles of PPE is good management. My sister is a nurse and she had been complaining about having to find gloves last year, long before there even was a crisis. Some of these hospitals really do skimp on equipment. Just In Time and LEAN practices are cool, but you need to keep a stock of backups enough to last a month or two in the event of a shortage where every other hospital is also trying to produce the same equipment. Some might say it’s easy to say this in hindsight, but I’ve been hearing about these practices long before this crisis. Right now everything on the news about these shortages just echoes what many healthcare professionals already knew and were concerned about. There are systemic management issues in the medical industry. Hopefully a bill comes from this.

by Aloha 7y ago

To all who are wondering why Facebook had masks - “To help, Facebook donated our emergency reserve of 720,000 masks that we had bought in case the wildfires continued,”

epistasis 7y ago

Which is enough for 14 days for ~50,000 people at 1/day. It seems like huge overkill when stated as a single number, but two weeks is a reasonable amount to plan for, especially for reserves at a time when the supply chain is stressed. I wish our hospitals' administration had as much foresight. I think this crisis is making it clear that management in health care is vastly overpaid.

nullc 7y ago
If you're wearing an n95 mask for particulate pollution there isn't a particular reason why you can't reuse it. When I heard the numbers, I figured they purchased extra so they could also supply them to the surrounding community so as to avoid drama about facebook employees having masks while few others did.
- abakker 7y ago
  I mean, they're good for 8-10 hours, but they don't last indefinitely.
  - DecoPerson 7y ago
    As far as I’ve heard, this is what the label recommends; however, in practice, they can be used for much longer. (I cannot remember my sources, sorry.)
  - hammock 7y ago
    Wore mine for 2 weeks during the fires when they were in short supply. It was definitely worse for wear at the end. And mine didn't have a valve on it. If it did, it might have lasted longer.
  - vmh1928 7y ago
    I used to mow 1/2 acre of Bermuda grass at least once a week from May - October on a riding mower. Would take 2 1/2 hours. I used the n95's you get at Home Depot and would reuse them for many weeks and probably could have continued to reuse them until I couldn't breath through them or the straps broke. They're for stopping particulates so as long as they're not clogged they still work. If the particulates are infectious virus particles then reuse becomes more problematic but they still filter particles.
  - abakker 7y ago
    Self reply to all others: try doing something that actually tests the limits a bit for health reasons. you can tell in a welding/woodshop when N95s and P100s go bad, they get physically harder to breath through after about 6-8 hours. If they don't they're not sealed well enough. they do keep working longer (probably), but they get quite a bit worse.
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      Doesn't really apply to the situation being discussed. You can absolutely wear it for two weeks during the fires. It will work just fine even well sealed. Not sufficient particulate matter in the air to be significant blocker.
  - oliwarner 7y ago
    The filtration doesn't run out when working with particulates, it actually gets better. The reason you have to replace them is they get too good at filtering and it restricts natural breath (or they get damaged). In this situation, you assume the mask catches particles containing coronavirus. The mask becomes a biohazard pretty quickly. They could probably be safely disinfected and reused.
nprz 7y ago
It truly is insane how quickly the severity of the crisis ramped up. Monday co-workers on slack were messaging how the flu was more of a worry, after Wednesday it was mandatory work from home. And it truly feels like medical authorities were as caught off guard as the rest of us. Who was on guard duty? Was no one monitoring the situation? No one thought to increase production of PPE or RNA tests?
- epistasis 7y ago
  Being as apolitical as possible, the fault is 100% Trump's. Our pandemic response team was gutted in Spring 2018. One of my favorite science journalists, Ed Yong, wrote this shortly after; there's a lot of contextual history before he starts spitting fire at the president's egotistic idiocy. > Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable—and in some respects is becoming quickly more so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even key items are made to order. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-the-next-plague-hits/561734/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-th... ^ this is our current system. The people that would have been responsible for activating production had been fired. The CDC bungled the first tests. The FDA prevented anybody but the CDC from performing tests until just recently. The FDA tried to stop the Seattle Flu Study from back testing their samples to find evidence of infections; the scientists defied the FDA and found early evidence that would not have been found earlier. Here's Trump responding to a reporter asking about the risks of firing the pandemic response team, back in 2018: https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/1239920268979646467?s=21 https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/123992026897964646... He later denied any knowledge of doing this. And instead of hiring back the people, he called the virus a Democrat hoax. Only later did he even pay attention to it, but there are debates about whether the VP he said was in charge, or his son-in-law is actually in charge. Nobody knows what is going on, every press conference is filled with basic inaccuracies, and he ignores the science. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explains-why-he-doesnt-correct-trump-during-press-conferences/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explain... It's rotten from the top. We have robbed our government from essential functions, not to really save any money, but because we have an executive that doesn't know what he is doing and is too narcissistic to let anybody stick around that might reveal his inferiority complex. Politicians that know better keep silent for fear of angering this president. This is not a partisan statement, this is a statement of the fundamental distinction of having a bad leader. No corporation would survive like this. For the federal government, which is several orders of magnitude more complex than any corporation, we are absolutely devastated by having such terrible executive leadership. People need to start speaking up and realizing that we must drop the partisanship in order for our country to remain a leader in science and economic power. It took climate scientistS more than a decade to realize that being apolitical meant that the science would be politicized by monied interests; anybody who is interested in truth and science should realize that we must now mobilize against a political force with so large a lust for power that it will acknowledge no external authority, no truth, no empirical reality. These are strange times.
KarlKemp 7y ago
Hospitals only get paid for actually treating people. Many of them have asked for financing for disaster preparation, but nobody was willing to pay for it.
jb775 7y ago
And it makes you wonder how exactly healthcare $$$ is flowing through the supply chain. It obviously isn't tied up in equipment inventory or logistics management. Time to shake the healthcare-costs tree and see what falls out!
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I believe the healthcare system is so bloated because of a lack of competition. It made news when Trump pushed for legislation that would force hospitals to tell you how much they cost. Think about that. Setting aside all the arguments that it shouldn't be left up to the free market at all, in what world can a marketplace be healthy without something so basic as price disclosure?
  - jb775 7y ago
    Good point, I know that healthcare price disclosure is legally required in Australia. I wonder how the systems compare. If you trace through the hospital's costs, it seems like a bulk of healthcare money ends up in the pockets of medical device companies. In my opinion, it doesn't seem like competition is behaving naturally at that level either. It seems like these companies are using the healthcare flustercluck as a proxy for anti-competitive behavior.
slg 7y ago
>I wish our hospitals' administration had as much foresight. I think this crisis is making it clear that management in health care is vastly overpaid. Facebook has just a tad bit more money to prepare for these remote possibilities compared with your average hospital. Plus hospitals have to justify every cost in relation to how many lives it will save. Is prepping for a once in a century pandemic going to save more lives than having an extra doctor on staff for every shift? Almost everyone would have answered no to that questions up until a few weeks or months ago.
- mygo 7y ago
  This isn’t a remote possibility. The California wildfires were real. People were wearing N95 masks last year due to the wildfires. There was even a famous article about a couple who had their engagement pictures taken wearing N95 masks due to the california wildfires, which you could see in the background of the photos. And since global warming is actually a real thing, we could project more wildfires for this year. It isn’t a “remote” possibility that facebook employees end up needing respirators since it isn’t a “remote” possibility that there will be wildfires again in California this year. That is what is expected to happen. Although it’s hard to tell what will be the impact of the global shut-downs reducing greenhouse gases on global temperatures this summer (if that will even have any impact so soon).
  - slg 7y ago
    You focused on the wrong end of my comment. I was defending the choices of the hospitals and not criticizing the choices of Facebook.
    - mygo 7y ago
      My apologies. Misunderstood your statement. I would still say that having stockpiles of PPE is good management. My sister is a nurse and she had been complaining about having to find gloves last year, long before there even was a crisis. Some of these hospitals really do skimp on equipment. Just In Time and LEAN practices are cool, but you need to keep a stock of backups enough to last a month or two in the event of a shortage where every other hospital is also trying to produce the same equipment. Some might say it’s easy to say this in hindsight, but I’ve been hearing about these practices long before this crisis. Right now everything on the news about these shortages just echoes what many healthcare professionals already knew and were concerned about. There are systemic management issues in the medical industry. Hopefully a bill comes from this.