8 ms·

Crimson Contagion

175 points by wyck 6y ago

eyelidlessness 6y ago
Maybe this is the hoax the dotard was thinking of? Edit: jfc it’s a joke. I understand the value of the exercise and I know the dotard is not confused by this in particular.
andai 6y ago
See also Event 201, two months later in October, a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Center_for_Health_Security#Event_201 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Center_for_Healt...
- kqr2 6y ago
  Nice explanation of why it was called Event 201: In recent years, the world has seen a growing number of epidemic events, amounting to approximately 200 events annually. These events are increasing, and they are disruptive to health, economies, and society. Managing these events already strains global capacity, even absent a pandemic threat. Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic, which becomes “Event 201,”
  - mirimir 6y ago
    And from the scenario:[0] > Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms. That's almost exactly what happened. Except for the jump through pigs. And the "growing number of epidemic events" is arguably caused by increasing human contact with previously isolated habitats, driven by population pressure.[1] 0) https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.html https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.ht... 1) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-11-billion-people-mean-disease-outbreaks/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-11-billion-p...
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  Non-mobile URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Center_for_Health_Security#Event_201 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Center_for_Healt...
- captn3m0 6y ago
  The highlight reel is just 12 minutes. https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/videos.html https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/videos.html
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  Unfortunately, this is fueling a lot of far fetched conspiracy theories that I expect to gain more steam over the next couple years. I'm afraid the anti vaxxers will latch onto things like this as soon as they start resurfacing.
  - coranon 6y ago
    I'm sure you aren't implying that conspiracy is just an imaginary concept that has never been actually a thing in history. The scenario of Event 201 simulation is pretty similar to what has unfolded just a few months later. This is just an objective observation. As far as a conspiracy, having a test-run simulation before the live campaign, that isn't a far-fetched idea. There are even stranger coincidences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Crowne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Crowne It was big news that Tom Hanks got Covid-19. In this film he was called Lance Corona. In one scene a guy in a Dracula/bat costume says that Larry Crowne/Lance Corona "maybe he got the flu". Obviously just another coincidence, right? What would be good recommendation for a threshold where one would decide on dismissing/considering coincidences/correlations?
KarlKemp 6y ago
The article cited by Wikipedia is pretty comprehensive (and damning): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronav...
- ajross 6y ago
  The parent comment is another situation on HN where (as I write this, anyway) a straightforward, relevant and constructive statement (it's just a link to a news article about exactly this subject) gets downvoted heavily for, as far as I can see, purely partisan reasons. And I only ever see this happen in one direction, politically. Can we really, as a community, not link to the New York Times without it being "controversial" and unwanted?
marvindanig 6y ago
Not much of a simulation [1] anymore. Lockdowns have to go strict imo, but with this inept administration in place I have little hope. :-( [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/marvindanig/status/1252029322589810693 https://mobile.twitter.com/marvindanig/status/12520293225898...
ajross 6y ago
What's interesting is the extent to which the real pandemic seems to have been handled better than the simulation, despite what is objectively a less effective federal response than the one envisioned (in practice, the actual federal response seems to have done more harm than good as far as disease control goes -- the one bright spot was the economic response). It turns out that a few early mover states were more willing than expected to institute rigorous lockdowns, other states followed on more rapidly than expected, and the population as a whole (even in states with less effective responses) was... actually fairly well informed and took appropriate action. Basically, we stayed home and beat this. Now we need to finish the job, of course, but absent some kind of crazy change in public behavior we're not going to see the doomsday numbers that everyone was worried about.
- chapium 6y ago
  If we had patient zero the outlook could have been even worse.
- remote_phone 6y ago
  I’m actually surprised at how compliant citizens were in general. I would have expected more rioting or pushback but I guess that’s what we are seeing right now. It’s been 6 weeks and I’m surviving but my wife and kids are not doing as well. I can only imagine how bad some people have it, especially those in apartments. At some point people are going to do the math and figure that 80% mild symptoms rate that leads to immunity and a decent job is worth the risk rather than starving to death alone. I think that breaking point will be reached before end of June and I hope there are measures to deal with that. Personally I would give everyone $2000/month and drop prices of marijuana to keep the masses from rioting.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Well the hospitals have plenty of excess capacity now. We’ve very successfully flattened the curve. It might be time to ease up. I thought this doctor explained the idea better than I could: https://medium.com/@jbgeach/eight-reasons-to-end-the-lockdowns-as-soon-as-possible-b7bb0bc94f00 https://medium.com/@jbgeach/eight-reasons-to-end-the-lockdow... But I’m just winging this like everyone. I could certainly be wrong.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
Our politicians live for today. They could care less about tomorrow. You can see this in all areas of “preparedness”, and it’s especially obvious in debt and pensions. No surprise here that our government was auctioning off ventilators and exhausting without replacing PPE gear stockpiles without a care in the world.
- KMag 6y ago
  I think politicians act the way they do because that's the way the populace incentivizes them to act. If anyone has good ideas for encouraging the types of societal/cultural changes necessary to (eventually) properly incentivize politicians, I'm all ears.
  - viklove 6y ago
    > the populace incentivizes them to act It's not "the populace," it's lobbyists that are funded by massive corporations that are trying to protect their revenue streams. What's the solution? Get the money out of politics. Make it illegal for government officials to take comfy six-figure corporate jobs after they finish their term, overturn Citizens United, put a limit on campaign spending or at least try to level the playing field in some way. That would be a great start. Regulatory capture means all of this is borderline impossible, though. We live in a world where even 100M people will have a hard time fighting the collective power of billions and billions of dollars. Money makes the world go 'round baby.
    - ryankemper 6y ago
      > Get the money out of politics. Make it illegal for government officials to take comfy six-figure corporate jobs after they finish their term, overturn Citizens United, put a limit on campaign spending or at least try to level the playing field in some way. How do you feel about the citizens united ruling, which (I am paraphrasing, perhaps poorly) found that by disallowing one to spend money on poltiical speech, that freedom of speech was impacted? I think it's actually quite a sensible point. Speech costs money. Therefore limits on the money an organization can spend is necessarily a limit on speech. ("Overturn citizens united" is the classic liberal/democrat view, but I really question how many have thought deeply about the implications of what they are proposing). -- BTW, as you probably know, regulations quickly get co-opted by corporations/lobbyists for their own ends. So, if there is a true desire to funnel money to politicians, they will find a way. Now, that does not mean that we shouldn't try to make that harder, if that's what we think is the right move (I think Citizens United was a great ruling. I assume you disagree based off of the above)
zuhayeer 6y ago
One of the key findings: "The United States lacks the production capacity to meet the demands for protective equipment and medical devices such as masks and ventilators imposed by a pandemic" This is exactly why we can't have the government move like molasses. We had several months, needed to react with urgency and failed.
- wyck 6y ago
  You can find the full .pdf report by googling "Crimson Contagion Functional Excercise Key Findings"
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Sure. Now show me the PDF that says what the government did in response to those findings.
    - javagram 6y ago
      Oh, they proposed in Feb 2020 to cut the budget for preparedness further of course. https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/healthpolicy/84813 https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/healthpolicy... “The proposed budget also cut the CDC's discretionary budget authority by $1.3 billion in fiscal 2021 compared with fiscal 2020 -- a 19% cut -- including $25 million from public health preparedness and response outlays.”
- adventured 6y ago
  > We had several months, needed to react with urgency and failed. That's a rewrite of the actual history that occurred and what people understood along the way. They had a realistic four to six weeks max to start production of ventilators. A herculean feat in fact. Even less time if you were going to judge it based on understanding the severity and particular intensive-care heavy effects of the virus. It was not a certainty to the outside world that it was human to human transmissable until the end of January. There was a lot of confusion due to the total lack of access to China and its data. From February 1st (China's reported numbers begin to spike here) to the point where you understand it's a high global risk, capable of a large scale outbreak that could threaten the US, it's another 1-2 weeks minimum based on the rate of expansion in China's reported numbers and their inability to contain it properly (and better yet, with China you watch what they do more than what they say; during that first and second week of February, China took what seemed like wild action domestically while playing down the danger of SARS-CoV-2 to the rest of the world, including regarding travel restrictions). Taking the decision to push billions of dollars in spending to jumpstart very early production of PPE and ventilators, is a big decision that you better be right about when you make it. You were going against the behavior of the entire developed world by producing ventilators in February, so now you need to be prepared to look like a paranoid lunatic, along with being called a racist and xenophobe while you restrict travel and close borders. It's February 7th and you need to coordinate with domestic industry, local governments, international agencies, and companies around the world. It's February 14th and you've got your first partnership together, they've agreed to produce ventilators. It's March 7-14th by the time they are able to produce their first ventilator after preparing a factory for it, preparing any necessary design changes to accomodate rapid scale production, and putting together a supply chain that can scale for the hundreds of specific parts in a ventilator. You need to build a scheme that can produce more ventilators than the present total global annual supply. It's mid to late April before they have consequential volume of production. Assuming things go well. Having closely followed all the ventilator efforts around the world, please show me a faster timeline that is realistic. You're only going to beat our present timeline by a matter of weeks, and that's if you aggressively jump out in front of prevailing 'wisdom' at the time. It's an extraordinary short amount of time to accomplish the ramping up of producing ventilators.
remote_phone 6y ago
Trump has fucked this entire response up and hopefully this is what leads to his loss in election. But to be fair, doing a test in August and October and then expecting anything significant to have been accomplished by any government by February is ridiculous. Even those that took it seriously would not have any sense of urgency to get things ready right away. You need to budget for it, etc and that takes months/years. To draw a similar point, all of the N95 masks in stockpile were used up in 2009 and never replenished by Obama. No one in 11 years and 2 presidencies took it seriously since then, so I would assume the same with this simulation as well.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ponyfleisch 6y ago
For people who are of the opinion that expensive preparation for low probability events is untenable for elected governments because it would be seen as wasteful: My home country (Switzerland) has a conscription army. ~160k people, each with either a pistol or an assault rifle at home, receiving regular training for a few weeks a year while the government compensates their employer for the loss in productivity. There are tanks, fighter jets and massive alpine fortifications. It's expensive. Most countries have an army and they are usually sized for an unlikely worst case scenario. One would think maintaining a stockpile of PPE that would allow the authorities to recommend (and even provide) masks for the general population without risking a shortage in health care would be a relatively minor expense compared to that. And yet, all over the western world, PPE is in short supply, and that is without the general public wearing masks like they do in many asian countries.
- rhino369 6y ago
  The bigger question is why we rely solely on disposable PPE for catastrophes. Instead of N95, they should be using P100 masks that can be cleaned and whose filters last a couple months in a hospital setting. They should have gowns that can be boiled and reused. Surgical masks that can be boiled, etc. Disposable PPE is used for convenience. It's easier and cheaper to throw away an N95 mask than to clean an P100 mask, except when you can't buy N95 masks.
  - nickff 6y ago
    The problem is not cleaning. The problems are design, donning, doffing, and tracking. If you have re-usable gear, you have to make VERY sure that what you think is clean is really clean. That means cleaning procedures have to be extremely thorough, and you have to make sure that you NEVER mistake a soiled unit for a clean one. In addition to designing things to be clean-able (which is much harder than it sounds), you need to make sure that they are designed in such a manner that they can be doffed safely. Taking off PPE sounds easy, but when you are guaranteed to come into contact with biohazards, you have to be extremely careful about how and what you do. Simply put; desiging, manufacturing, and safely using re-usable PPE for use in biohazardous environments is much harder than it sounds.

175 points by wyck 6y ago

Maybe this is the hoax the dotard was thinking of? Edit: jfc it’s a joke. I understand the value of the exercise and I know the dotard is not confused by this in particular.

andai 6y ago

See also Event 201, two months later in October, a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Center_for_Health_Security#Event_201 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Center_for_Healt...

kqr2 6y ago
Nice explanation of why it was called Event 201: In recent years, the world has seen a growing number of epidemic events, amounting to approximately 200 events annually. These events are increasing, and they are disruptive to health, economies, and society. Managing these events already strains global capacity, even absent a pandemic threat. Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic, which becomes “Event 201,”
- mirimir 6y ago
  And from the scenario:[0] > Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms. That's almost exactly what happened. Except for the jump through pigs. And the "growing number of epidemic events" is arguably caused by increasing human contact with previously isolated habitats, driven by population pressure.[1] 0) https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.html https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.ht... 1) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-11-billion-people-mean-disease-outbreaks/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-11-billion-p...
LeoPanthera 6y ago
Non-mobile URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Center_for_Health_Security#Event_201 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Center_for_Healt...
captn3m0 6y ago
The highlight reel is just 12 minutes. https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/videos.html https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/videos.html
Trasmatta 6y ago
Unfortunately, this is fueling a lot of far fetched conspiracy theories that I expect to gain more steam over the next couple years. I'm afraid the anti vaxxers will latch onto things like this as soon as they start resurfacing.
- coranon 6y ago
  I'm sure you aren't implying that conspiracy is just an imaginary concept that has never been actually a thing in history. The scenario of Event 201 simulation is pretty similar to what has unfolded just a few months later. This is just an objective observation. As far as a conspiracy, having a test-run simulation before the live campaign, that isn't a far-fetched idea. There are even stranger coincidences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Crowne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Crowne It was big news that Tom Hanks got Covid-19. In this film he was called Lance Corona. In one scene a guy in a Dracula/bat costume says that Larry Crowne/Lance Corona "maybe he got the flu". Obviously just another coincidence, right? What would be good recommendation for a threshold where one would decide on dismissing/considering coincidences/correlations?

KarlKemp 6y ago

The article cited by Wikipedia is pretty comprehensive (and damning): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronav...

ajross 6y ago
The parent comment is another situation on HN where (as I write this, anyway) a straightforward, relevant and constructive statement (it's just a link to a news article about exactly this subject) gets downvoted heavily for, as far as I can see, purely partisan reasons. And I only ever see this happen in one direction, politically. Can we really, as a community, not link to the New York Times without it being "controversial" and unwanted?

marvindanig 6y ago

Not much of a simulation [1] anymore. Lockdowns have to go strict imo, but with this inept administration in place I have little hope. :-( [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/marvindanig/status/1252029322589810693 https://mobile.twitter.com/marvindanig/status/12520293225898...

ajross 6y ago

What's interesting is the extent to which the real pandemic seems to have been handled better than the simulation, despite what is objectively a less effective federal response than the one envisioned (in practice, the actual federal response seems to have done more harm than good as far as disease control goes -- the one bright spot was the economic response). It turns out that a few early mover states were more willing than expected to institute rigorous lockdowns, other states followed on more rapidly than expected, and the population as a whole (even in states with less effective responses) was... actually fairly well informed and took appropriate action. Basically, we stayed home and beat this. Now we need to finish the job, of course, but absent some kind of crazy change in public behavior we're not going to see the doomsday numbers that everyone was worried about.

chapium 6y ago
If we had patient zero the outlook could have been even worse.
remote_phone 6y ago
I’m actually surprised at how compliant citizens were in general. I would have expected more rioting or pushback but I guess that’s what we are seeing right now. It’s been 6 weeks and I’m surviving but my wife and kids are not doing as well. I can only imagine how bad some people have it, especially those in apartments. At some point people are going to do the math and figure that 80% mild symptoms rate that leads to immunity and a decent job is worth the risk rather than starving to death alone. I think that breaking point will be reached before end of June and I hope there are measures to deal with that. Personally I would give everyone $2000/month and drop prices of marijuana to keep the masses from rioting.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Well the hospitals have plenty of excess capacity now. We’ve very successfully flattened the curve. It might be time to ease up. I thought this doctor explained the idea better than I could: https://medium.com/@jbgeach/eight-reasons-to-end-the-lockdowns-as-soon-as-possible-b7bb0bc94f00 https://medium.com/@jbgeach/eight-reasons-to-end-the-lockdow... But I’m just winging this like everyone. I could certainly be wrong.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago

Our politicians live for today. They could care less about tomorrow. You can see this in all areas of “preparedness”, and it’s especially obvious in debt and pensions. No surprise here that our government was auctioning off ventilators and exhausting without replacing PPE gear stockpiles without a care in the world.

KMag 6y ago
I think politicians act the way they do because that's the way the populace incentivizes them to act. If anyone has good ideas for encouraging the types of societal/cultural changes necessary to (eventually) properly incentivize politicians, I'm all ears.
- viklove 6y ago
  > the populace incentivizes them to act It's not "the populace," it's lobbyists that are funded by massive corporations that are trying to protect their revenue streams. What's the solution? Get the money out of politics. Make it illegal for government officials to take comfy six-figure corporate jobs after they finish their term, overturn Citizens United, put a limit on campaign spending or at least try to level the playing field in some way. That would be a great start. Regulatory capture means all of this is borderline impossible, though. We live in a world where even 100M people will have a hard time fighting the collective power of billions and billions of dollars. Money makes the world go 'round baby.
  - ryankemper 6y ago
    > Get the money out of politics. Make it illegal for government officials to take comfy six-figure corporate jobs after they finish their term, overturn Citizens United, put a limit on campaign spending or at least try to level the playing field in some way. How do you feel about the citizens united ruling, which (I am paraphrasing, perhaps poorly) found that by disallowing one to spend money on poltiical speech, that freedom of speech was impacted? I think it's actually quite a sensible point. Speech costs money. Therefore limits on the money an organization can spend is necessarily a limit on speech. ("Overturn citizens united" is the classic liberal/democrat view, but I really question how many have thought deeply about the implications of what they are proposing). -- BTW, as you probably know, regulations quickly get co-opted by corporations/lobbyists for their own ends. So, if there is a true desire to funnel money to politicians, they will find a way. Now, that does not mean that we shouldn't try to make that harder, if that's what we think is the right move (I think Citizens United was a great ruling. I assume you disagree based off of the above)

zuhayeer 6y ago

One of the key findings: "The United States lacks the production capacity to meet the demands for protective equipment and medical devices such as masks and ventilators imposed by a pandemic" This is exactly why we can't have the government move like molasses. We had several months, needed to react with urgency and failed.

wyck 6y ago
You can find the full .pdf report by googling "Crimson Contagion Functional Excercise Key Findings"
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Sure. Now show me the PDF that says what the government did in response to those findings.
  - javagram 6y ago
    Oh, they proposed in Feb 2020 to cut the budget for preparedness further of course. https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/healthpolicy/84813 https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/healthpolicy... “The proposed budget also cut the CDC's discretionary budget authority by $1.3 billion in fiscal 2021 compared with fiscal 2020 -- a 19% cut -- including $25 million from public health preparedness and response outlays.”
adventured 6y ago
> We had several months, needed to react with urgency and failed. That's a rewrite of the actual history that occurred and what people understood along the way. They had a realistic four to six weeks max to start production of ventilators. A herculean feat in fact. Even less time if you were going to judge it based on understanding the severity and particular intensive-care heavy effects of the virus. It was not a certainty to the outside world that it was human to human transmissable until the end of January. There was a lot of confusion due to the total lack of access to China and its data. From February 1st (China's reported numbers begin to spike here) to the point where you understand it's a high global risk, capable of a large scale outbreak that could threaten the US, it's another 1-2 weeks minimum based on the rate of expansion in China's reported numbers and their inability to contain it properly (and better yet, with China you watch what they do more than what they say; during that first and second week of February, China took what seemed like wild action domestically while playing down the danger of SARS-CoV-2 to the rest of the world, including regarding travel restrictions). Taking the decision to push billions of dollars in spending to jumpstart very early production of PPE and ventilators, is a big decision that you better be right about when you make it. You were going against the behavior of the entire developed world by producing ventilators in February, so now you need to be prepared to look like a paranoid lunatic, along with being called a racist and xenophobe while you restrict travel and close borders. It's February 7th and you need to coordinate with domestic industry, local governments, international agencies, and companies around the world. It's February 14th and you've got your first partnership together, they've agreed to produce ventilators. It's March 7-14th by the time they are able to produce their first ventilator after preparing a factory for it, preparing any necessary design changes to accomodate rapid scale production, and putting together a supply chain that can scale for the hundreds of specific parts in a ventilator. You need to build a scheme that can produce more ventilators than the present total global annual supply. It's mid to late April before they have consequential volume of production. Assuming things go well. Having closely followed all the ventilator efforts around the world, please show me a faster timeline that is realistic. You're only going to beat our present timeline by a matter of weeks, and that's if you aggressively jump out in front of prevailing 'wisdom' at the time. It's an extraordinary short amount of time to accomplish the ramping up of producing ventilators.

remote_phone 6y ago

Trump has fucked this entire response up and hopefully this is what leads to his loss in election. But to be fair, doing a test in August and October and then expecting anything significant to have been accomplished by any government by February is ridiculous. Even those that took it seriously would not have any sense of urgency to get things ready right away. You need to budget for it, etc and that takes months/years. To draw a similar point, all of the N95 masks in stockpile were used up in 2009 and never replenished by Obama. No one in 11 years and 2 presidencies took it seriously since then, so I would assume the same with this simulation as well.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ponyfleisch 6y ago

For people who are of the opinion that expensive preparation for low probability events is untenable for elected governments because it would be seen as wasteful: My home country (Switzerland) has a conscription army. ~160k people, each with either a pistol or an assault rifle at home, receiving regular training for a few weeks a year while the government compensates their employer for the loss in productivity. There are tanks, fighter jets and massive alpine fortifications. It's expensive. Most countries have an army and they are usually sized for an unlikely worst case scenario. One would think maintaining a stockpile of PPE that would allow the authorities to recommend (and even provide) masks for the general population without risking a shortage in health care would be a relatively minor expense compared to that. And yet, all over the western world, PPE is in short supply, and that is without the general public wearing masks like they do in many asian countries.

rhino369 6y ago
The bigger question is why we rely solely on disposable PPE for catastrophes. Instead of N95, they should be using P100 masks that can be cleaned and whose filters last a couple months in a hospital setting. They should have gowns that can be boiled and reused. Surgical masks that can be boiled, etc. Disposable PPE is used for convenience. It's easier and cheaper to throw away an N95 mask than to clean an P100 mask, except when you can't buy N95 masks.
- nickff 6y ago
  The problem is not cleaning. The problems are design, donning, doffing, and tracking. If you have re-usable gear, you have to make VERY sure that what you think is clean is really clean. That means cleaning procedures have to be extremely thorough, and you have to make sure that you NEVER mistake a soiled unit for a clean one. In addition to designing things to be clean-able (which is much harder than it sounds), you need to make sure that they are designed in such a manner that they can be doffed safely. Taking off PPE sounds easy, but when you are guaranteed to come into contact with biohazards, you have to be extremely careful about how and what you do. Simply put; desiging, manufacturing, and safely using re-usable PPE for use in biohazardous environments is much harder than it sounds.