10 ms·

This is insane. 5x markup and federal seizure of privately procured masks that will then get given to private companies to give to hospitals. Instead, the gover

This is insane. 5x markup and federal seizure of privately procured masks that will then get given to private companies to give to hospitals. Instead, the government could institute price controls and distribute directly to those in need or allow all private purchases to go through while controlling part of the market. Absolutely crazy. Not to mention having to hope your governor praises the federal government to get their masks back. You could not have invented a worse scheme for this, but somehow they have, AND they’re using federal manpower (in N95s, naturally) to intercept these shipments.

m4rtink 7y ago
>This is insane. 5x markup and federal seizure of privately procured masks that will then get given to private companies to give to hospitals. Instead, the government could institute price controls and distribute directly to those in need or allow all private purchases to go through while controlling part of the market. Absolutely crazy. Not to mention having to hope your governor praises the federal government to get their masks back. This is pretty much how it went here in Czech Republic - initially outright ban on sale on the PPE needed by medical personnel, that was only removed very recently. And the state (army & fire fighters to be precise) handling all the distribution of PPE. Mainly to hospitals, care homes and also to local municipality offices where local general practitioners could pick them up. First state distributed the PPE from the (unfortunately rather small) existing emergency stockpile, later from a central warehouse located next to a suitable airport close to the middle of the country where most of the "aerial bridge" cargo aircraft with PPE ordered from China land.
- hef19898 7y ago
  Firefighters played a crucial part in the distribution concept I came up with two weeks ago. Nice to see something like that being implemented! Do you have any details of how the logistics are run, especially the last mile? Really curious, because I never heard back from German authorities so far.
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    I'm not sure there is much coverage of that in English - from the local news, it looks like this: - stuff gets ordered via Czech economic mission in China, communication goes by Chinese speaking Czech experts remotely, coordinating even the planes being loaded and other details - plane lands in Pardubice/Prague/Ostrava airport - supplies go to government stockpile in Opočník, designated as the centrail distribution point (from PRague and Ostrava I guess it might go directly to the destination sometimes, as that could be quicker that getting to Opočník & then back) - army and firefigter transport it from the central stockpile to hispitals/care homes/minicipal offices/to army/firefighters/police who need it For some English info: https://www.expats.cz/ https://www.expats.cz/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_the_Czech_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_t...
    - hef19898 7y ago
      Thanks a lot!
- yread 7y ago
  Not everything is rosy though. Ministries buying 40m eur worth medical equipment from some company that had no revenues last year or year before that. One ministry paying double the price for the same thing as the other. And that's not even mentioning how many companies from prime minister's holding are benefitting disproportionately - subsidies, testing, hand sanitizer....
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    Yeah, it's definitely not perfect, but at the same time IMHO much better than the responce in other countries (or the lack thereof).
blackrock 7y ago
I saw an article saying the 5x markup is because of the air freight, which costs more. Normally, the masks and other gear, are shipped via boat, and it takes over 30 days to transport it. But this is an emergency, so that lag in transport would have killed even more people and health care workers. Hence, the need to deliver it by air. The problem is that the air freight companies are now resource constrained, that they are charging 3 to 4 times more than normal. These are the people that are causing the price gouging. Then, to make matters worse, some European countries went on a media blitz to complain about shoddy Chinese made products. They bought non-medical masks, and were expecting it to be medical grade products! So they complained about it on Twitter, which forced the China central government to crack down on manufacturers, and only allow “medical grade” certified masks to be shipped. This placed an even larger burden on the supply chain. (However, other masks not stamped with a “medical” label on it, were allowed to normally ship, as a consumer-grade item. So buy it at your own risk.) So, this resulted in news that some expensive air freight flights, were only returning half-full. The other half was still sitting in the warehouse, awaiting customs export inspection approval, from the new Quality Control regulation. Then, to make matters even worse, all countries all over the world, are now competing for the same products from China. And the Americans are buying the product outright, and in cash, and paying double or triple, what European countries are paying. This all adds to the cost per product, which ends up justifying the 5x increase.
- sailfast 7y ago
  The freight costs makes sense and that's a great counterpoint. Thanks! That said, the government has the ability to cap mask costs per unit and then only charge for shipping or, you know, bring a bunch of C5s and do the freight themselves to get the cargo hours. Or charter planes to help with airline bailouts or... Instead of hammering the hospitals we have all sorts of options to help here. The fact that the only thing that occurred was HARMFUL to the process says a lot. It must feel pretty weird to be told "you're on your own" and then also have that same crew confiscate your mask shipments. That's what the mafia would do. Would be a shame if something happened to your PPE...
- baybal2 7y ago
  > which forced the China central government to crack down on manufacturers, and only allow “medical grade” certified masks to be shipped. There is way more to it than that. That was a very convenient pretext for China to legitimise its unofficial exports ban. It reduced the number of exporters to single digits per provice, and even few ones with appropriate licenses are now being turn arond at customs without explanations. China's official Red Cross, however, seems to have zero problem exporting just anything off the shelf. Even supplies for which there simply can't be a medical certification are stalling at customs. I know a person who works in medical clothing industry, and they ran into that with... hospital bedsheets. As of now, the lion share of PPE coming from China is effectively being smuggled out.
voodooranger 7y ago
Price ceilings cause shortages. Every time. Let’s not use Venezuelan-style economic illiteracy as a model for how to incentivize the flow of critical supplies to those who need it most during a crisis.
- thelean12 7y ago
  What about price ceilings and purchase limits? You'd have to actually think about the purchase limits for different entities but it sounds doable.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Venezuela's problems come from international banking controls combined with hyperinflation and mandates to not increase prices. When you have a currency losing its value every week and the government mandating 10 cent gas with no way to transact with the outside world and escape your currency, things are going to get very distorted. Venezuela has much bigger problems than price caps, it is not indicative of systemic ramifications either way here.
- qqssccfftt 7y ago
  I wonder how anyone can write a comment like this and think that our economic model is not completely broken for anything other than making one group richer.
  - astronautjones 7y ago
    leading a life insulated from the consequences of living in this economic model
  - rhino369 7y ago
    Whether or not you think our model is broken, price controls of goods you want more of is a terrible policy. If you want someone to open up a factory churning out PPE, which might only be needed for a few months, you need to let them charge a huge premium.
xster 7y ago
And that's in the present. What's more frustrating too is that if we're still debating about the present, there will certainly not be any accountability for the lack of preparedness from all levels of government in the past to prepare for health crisis. Compare to these images https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/雁塔_曲江收费站的防疫检查_01.jpg/440px-雁塔_曲江收费站的防疫检查_01.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/雁塔... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Check_for_2019-nCoV_in_Jishuitan_metro_station_%28Beijing%29.jpg/440px-Check_for_2019-nCoV_in_Jishuitan_metro_station_%28Beijing%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Ch... (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_i...) where even the random person checking your temperature at subway entrances and toll stations are armed to the teeth in PPEs in China. And that's coming from a country that wasn't even able to genetically map SARS themselves <20 years ago.
- baybal2 7y ago
  This is the point I've tried to convey to my peers in the West over, and over, and over for years. I hope this would finally be a rude awakening moment for countries in the West. The decay of essential social institutes in the West has reached the point when issues begin to snowball uncontrollably. I don't like many points of that guy called Neil Fergusson makes, but he is 100% on the spot pointing that the West is loosing the "institutional IQ" after 20 to 30 years of "ultrapopulism" in government. Just look at the level of organisation being exhibited now, and how emergency response was handled few decades ago. Quarantines were not so unheard of in the West even for things like bad flu outbreaks in the 20th century, but, nowadays, some countries can't quarantine even a single city.
  - makomk 7y ago
    Institutional IQ or leadership or anything else like that does you no good when your country no longer has the manufacturing infrastructure to make PPE anymore and the countries which can would rather use it to protect their own citizens, and it's mostly the anti-populists which seem to be doubling down on denying that simple fact.
pmorici 7y ago
Whats even more nuts is that N95's have taken this level of importance in healthcare at all instead of reusable P100 masks. I read a post on medium the other day about a hospital in Texas that does that and it was being treated as some kind of amazing discovery as if this was some unknown miracle device. [0] https://elemental.medium.com/a-tiny-hospital-in-texas-might-help-solve-the-mask-shortage-9ad3c0a7a861 https://elemental.medium.com/a-tiny-hospital-in-texas-might-...
- prostheticvamp 7y ago
  For most healthcare workers, it is unknown to them. N95 is the standard. And P100s were sold out early into this adventure.
  - xg15 7y ago
    I wonder, could the plastic part of P100s be 3D printed? (Or otherwise manufactured in fablabs)?
    - mhb 7y ago
      Not unless you have a material that conforms nicely to a face. But you can still buy face pieces. The filters are what are hard to get.
    - vmh1928 7y ago
      Yes, search on Montana Mask. The 3D files are available and you could print them at home. Part of the mask is the filter holder which you can stuff with N1900 or greater furnace filters, vacuum cleaner HEPA bags or whatever. Edit- sorry, it's not quite like the P100, the filter holder is a rectangle in the center of the mask as opposed to the mask in the article that has two filter holders.
    - m4rtink 7y ago
      Yep, one by Czech Technical University: https://www.ciirc.cvut.cz/covid-2/ https://www.ciirc.cvut.cz/covid-2/ https://www.rp95.cz/en/ https://www.rp95.cz/en/ And most rencently, after the 3D printed protoypes turned ot to work very well, an automated assembly line was put togehter in record time: https://www.ciirc.cvut.cz/seriova-vyroba-ceske-masky-s-nejvyssim-stupnem-ochrany-byla-zahajena-do-priprav-se-zapojilo-vice-nez-tricet-ceskych-spolecnosti/ https://www.ciirc.cvut.cz/seriova-vyroba-ceske-masky-s-nejvy... The other major technical university - Brno Uiversity of Technology - also developped a 3D printable face mask design: https://www.vutbr.cz/en/mask https://www.vutbr.cz/en/mask https://www.vutbr.cz/en/but/news-f19528/covid-19-protection-halfmask-but-h1-d197642 https://www.vutbr.cz/en/but/news-f19528/covid-19-protection-... In comparion to the mask above, this is a 100% DIY design that one can assemble with common hashold items and a 3D printer.
prostheticvamp 7y ago
> Instead, the government could institute price controls and distribute directly to those in need or allow all private purchases to go throug Every country in the world is hunting for N95s right now. For the US to institute price controls just means the supply will shift to another country that doesn’t.
- praxulus 7y ago
  If the top 10 bidders are all Americans (which is plausible, given America's wealth and inflated healthcare costs), the U.S. government could use price controls to drive the price down from the 2nd highest to the 10th highest bid without losing supply to other countries. There's still the possibility that driving prices down would push manufacturers out of the business (or more likely, fail to pull in manufacturers who otherwise would have started producing PPE).
m0zg 7y ago
>> distribute directly to those in need or allow I'm not sure what you're complaining about then. This is exactly what those federal agents attempted to do (and chose not to do). Are you saying it'd be preferable if these masks were seized by the Feds and sent to e.g. New York? >> institute price controls That's a very good way to ensure those masks go to other buyers. I'm just not sure that's what you were aiming for.
m3nu 7y ago
I also help with buying PPE currently and it's not 5x markup by the seller only. Everything got more expensive. Input material, machines, shipping. This results in the final price being 5x (or more). It's not the greed of one sales person (mostly). Most factories I work with are NOT looking to take advantage of the situation. It actually hurts them because they can't accept new orders when they don't know the future cost of raw material next week.
edge17 7y ago
The 5x markup is basically in line with the increase in material cost and increase in risk of importing. The melt blown fabric prices have been increasing dramatically since January when China ramped up production.

m4rtink 7y ago

>This is insane. 5x markup and federal seizure of privately procured masks that will then get given to private companies to give to hospitals. Instead, the government could institute price controls and distribute directly to those in need or allow all private purchases to go through while controlling part of the market. Absolutely crazy. Not to mention having to hope your governor praises the federal government to get their masks back. This is pretty much how it went here in Czech Republic - initially outright ban on sale on the PPE needed by medical personnel, that was only removed very recently. And the state (army & fire fighters to be precise) handling all the distribution of PPE. Mainly to hospitals, care homes and also to local municipality offices where local general practitioners could pick them up. First state distributed the PPE from the (unfortunately rather small) existing emergency stockpile, later from a central warehouse located next to a suitable airport close to the middle of the country where most of the "aerial bridge" cargo aircraft with PPE ordered from China land.

hef19898 7y ago
Firefighters played a crucial part in the distribution concept I came up with two weeks ago. Nice to see something like that being implemented! Do you have any details of how the logistics are run, especially the last mile? Really curious, because I never heard back from German authorities so far.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  I'm not sure there is much coverage of that in English - from the local news, it looks like this: - stuff gets ordered via Czech economic mission in China, communication goes by Chinese speaking Czech experts remotely, coordinating even the planes being loaded and other details - plane lands in Pardubice/Prague/Ostrava airport - supplies go to government stockpile in Opočník, designated as the centrail distribution point (from PRague and Ostrava I guess it might go directly to the destination sometimes, as that could be quicker that getting to Opočník & then back) - army and firefigter transport it from the central stockpile to hispitals/care homes/minicipal offices/to army/firefighters/police who need it For some English info: https://www.expats.cz/ https://www.expats.cz/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_the_Czech_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_t...
  - hef19898 7y ago
    Thanks a lot!
yread 7y ago
Not everything is rosy though. Ministries buying 40m eur worth medical equipment from some company that had no revenues last year or year before that. One ministry paying double the price for the same thing as the other. And that's not even mentioning how many companies from prime minister's holding are benefitting disproportionately - subsidies, testing, hand sanitizer....
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Yeah, it's definitely not perfect, but at the same time IMHO much better than the responce in other countries (or the lack thereof).

blackrock 7y ago

I saw an article saying the 5x markup is because of the air freight, which costs more. Normally, the masks and other gear, are shipped via boat, and it takes over 30 days to transport it. But this is an emergency, so that lag in transport would have killed even more people and health care workers. Hence, the need to deliver it by air. The problem is that the air freight companies are now resource constrained, that they are charging 3 to 4 times more than normal. These are the people that are causing the price gouging. Then, to make matters worse, some European countries went on a media blitz to complain about shoddy Chinese made products. They bought non-medical masks, and were expecting it to be medical grade products! So they complained about it on Twitter, which forced the China central government to crack down on manufacturers, and only allow “medical grade” certified masks to be shipped. This placed an even larger burden on the supply chain. (However, other masks not stamped with a “medical” label on it, were allowed to normally ship, as a consumer-grade item. So buy it at your own risk.) So, this resulted in news that some expensive air freight flights, were only returning half-full. The other half was still sitting in the warehouse, awaiting customs export inspection approval, from the new Quality Control regulation. Then, to make matters even worse, all countries all over the world, are now competing for the same products from China. And the Americans are buying the product outright, and in cash, and paying double or triple, what European countries are paying. This all adds to the cost per product, which ends up justifying the 5x increase.

sailfast 7y ago
The freight costs makes sense and that's a great counterpoint. Thanks! That said, the government has the ability to cap mask costs per unit and then only charge for shipping or, you know, bring a bunch of C5s and do the freight themselves to get the cargo hours. Or charter planes to help with airline bailouts or... Instead of hammering the hospitals we have all sorts of options to help here. The fact that the only thing that occurred was HARMFUL to the process says a lot. It must feel pretty weird to be told "you're on your own" and then also have that same crew confiscate your mask shipments. That's what the mafia would do. Would be a shame if something happened to your PPE...
baybal2 7y ago
> which forced the China central government to crack down on manufacturers, and only allow “medical grade” certified masks to be shipped. There is way more to it than that. That was a very convenient pretext for China to legitimise its unofficial exports ban. It reduced the number of exporters to single digits per provice, and even few ones with appropriate licenses are now being turn arond at customs without explanations. China's official Red Cross, however, seems to have zero problem exporting just anything off the shelf. Even supplies for which there simply can't be a medical certification are stalling at customs. I know a person who works in medical clothing industry, and they ran into that with... hospital bedsheets. As of now, the lion share of PPE coming from China is effectively being smuggled out.

voodooranger 7y ago

Price ceilings cause shortages. Every time. Let’s not use Venezuelan-style economic illiteracy as a model for how to incentivize the flow of critical supplies to those who need it most during a crisis.

thelean12 7y ago
What about price ceilings and purchase limits? You'd have to actually think about the purchase limits for different entities but it sounds doable.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
BubRoss 7y ago
Venezuela's problems come from international banking controls combined with hyperinflation and mandates to not increase prices. When you have a currency losing its value every week and the government mandating 10 cent gas with no way to transact with the outside world and escape your currency, things are going to get very distorted. Venezuela has much bigger problems than price caps, it is not indicative of systemic ramifications either way here.
qqssccfftt 7y ago
I wonder how anyone can write a comment like this and think that our economic model is not completely broken for anything other than making one group richer.
- astronautjones 7y ago
  leading a life insulated from the consequences of living in this economic model
- rhino369 7y ago
  Whether or not you think our model is broken, price controls of goods you want more of is a terrible policy. If you want someone to open up a factory churning out PPE, which might only be needed for a few months, you need to let them charge a huge premium.

xster 7y ago

And that's in the present. What's more frustrating too is that if we're still debating about the present, there will certainly not be any accountability for the lack of preparedness from all levels of government in the past to prepare for health crisis. Compare to these images https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/雁塔_曲江收费站的防疫检查_01.jpg/440px-雁塔_曲江收费站的防疫检查_01.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/雁塔... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Check_for_2019-nCoV_in_Jishuitan_metro_station_%28Beijing%29.jpg/440px-Check_for_2019-nCoV_in_Jishuitan_metro_station_%28Beijing%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Ch... (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_i...) where even the random person checking your temperature at subway entrances and toll stations are armed to the teeth in PPEs in China. And that's coming from a country that wasn't even able to genetically map SARS themselves <20 years ago.

baybal2 7y ago
This is the point I've tried to convey to my peers in the West over, and over, and over for years. I hope this would finally be a rude awakening moment for countries in the West. The decay of essential social institutes in the West has reached the point when issues begin to snowball uncontrollably. I don't like many points of that guy called Neil Fergusson makes, but he is 100% on the spot pointing that the West is loosing the "institutional IQ" after 20 to 30 years of "ultrapopulism" in government. Just look at the level of organisation being exhibited now, and how emergency response was handled few decades ago. Quarantines were not so unheard of in the West even for things like bad flu outbreaks in the 20th century, but, nowadays, some countries can't quarantine even a single city.
- makomk 7y ago
  Institutional IQ or leadership or anything else like that does you no good when your country no longer has the manufacturing infrastructure to make PPE anymore and the countries which can would rather use it to protect their own citizens, and it's mostly the anti-populists which seem to be doubling down on denying that simple fact.

pmorici 7y ago

Whats even more nuts is that N95's have taken this level of importance in healthcare at all instead of reusable P100 masks. I read a post on medium the other day about a hospital in Texas that does that and it was being treated as some kind of amazing discovery as if this was some unknown miracle device. [0] https://elemental.medium.com/a-tiny-hospital-in-texas-might-help-solve-the-mask-shortage-9ad3c0a7a861 https://elemental.medium.com/a-tiny-hospital-in-texas-might-...

prostheticvamp 7y ago
For most healthcare workers, it is unknown to them. N95 is the standard. And P100s were sold out early into this adventure.
- xg15 7y ago
  I wonder, could the plastic part of P100s be 3D printed? (Or otherwise manufactured in fablabs)?
  - mhb 7y ago
    Not unless you have a material that conforms nicely to a face. But you can still buy face pieces. The filters are what are hard to get.
  - vmh1928 7y ago
    Yes, search on Montana Mask. The 3D files are available and you could print them at home. Part of the mask is the filter holder which you can stuff with N1900 or greater furnace filters, vacuum cleaner HEPA bags or whatever. Edit- sorry, it's not quite like the P100, the filter holder is a rectangle in the center of the mask as opposed to the mask in the article that has two filter holders.
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    Yep, one by Czech Technical University: https://www.ciirc.cvut.cz/covid-2/ https://www.ciirc.cvut.cz/covid-2/ https://www.rp95.cz/en/ https://www.rp95.cz/en/ And most rencently, after the 3D printed protoypes turned ot to work very well, an automated assembly line was put togehter in record time: https://www.ciirc.cvut.cz/seriova-vyroba-ceske-masky-s-nejvyssim-stupnem-ochrany-byla-zahajena-do-priprav-se-zapojilo-vice-nez-tricet-ceskych-spolecnosti/ https://www.ciirc.cvut.cz/seriova-vyroba-ceske-masky-s-nejvy... The other major technical university - Brno Uiversity of Technology - also developped a 3D printable face mask design: https://www.vutbr.cz/en/mask https://www.vutbr.cz/en/mask https://www.vutbr.cz/en/but/news-f19528/covid-19-protection-halfmask-but-h1-d197642 https://www.vutbr.cz/en/but/news-f19528/covid-19-protection-... In comparion to the mask above, this is a 100% DIY design that one can assemble with common hashold items and a 3D printer.

prostheticvamp 7y ago

> Instead, the government could institute price controls and distribute directly to those in need or allow all private purchases to go throug Every country in the world is hunting for N95s right now. For the US to institute price controls just means the supply will shift to another country that doesn’t.

praxulus 7y ago
If the top 10 bidders are all Americans (which is plausible, given America's wealth and inflated healthcare costs), the U.S. government could use price controls to drive the price down from the 2nd highest to the 10th highest bid without losing supply to other countries. There's still the possibility that driving prices down would push manufacturers out of the business (or more likely, fail to pull in manufacturers who otherwise would have started producing PPE).

m0zg 7y ago

>> distribute directly to those in need or allow I'm not sure what you're complaining about then. This is exactly what those federal agents attempted to do (and chose not to do). Are you saying it'd be preferable if these masks were seized by the Feds and sent to e.g. New York? >> institute price controls That's a very good way to ensure those masks go to other buyers. I'm just not sure that's what you were aiming for.

m3nu 7y ago

I also help with buying PPE currently and it's not 5x markup by the seller only. Everything got more expensive. Input material, machines, shipping. This results in the final price being 5x (or more). It's not the greed of one sales person (mostly). Most factories I work with are NOT looking to take advantage of the situation. It actually hurts them because they can't accept new orders when they don't know the future cost of raw material next week.

edge17 7y ago

The 5x markup is basically in line with the increase in material cost and increase in risk of importing. The melt blown fabric prices have been increasing dramatically since January when China ramped up production.