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This is a complexity issue. You can fashion a ventilator out of basically old vacuum cleaner parts. N95 masks are spun with what amounts to an extremely fancy

This is a complexity issue. You can fashion a ventilator out of basically old vacuum cleaner parts. N95 masks are spun with what amounts to an extremely fancy cotton candy machine that spins the fibers together. The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/16/814929294/covid-19-has-caused-a-shortage-of-face-masks-but-theyre-surprisingly-hard-to-mak https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/16/8149292...

mattacular 6y ago
Pretty sure there is still going to be demand in 6 months.
wil421 6y ago
> The Department of Health and Human Services did fund the invention of a “one-of-a-kind, high-speed machine” that could make 1.5 million N95s per day. But when the design was completed in 2018, the Trump administration did not purchase it. The administration had a chance to buy machines that could do it but chose not to. Hindsight is 20/20. > Except that in 2009, while Fuller was in his first job out of college, the H1N1 flu epidemic depleted 85 million N95s from the national stockpile — and the supply was never replenished. In 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017, public health officials published alarming reports warning of a “massive gap” in what remained. Even more concerning, they said, the vast majority of N95s and the materials needed to manufacture them were now being made in Asia. The previous administration didn’t care either and chose to not replenish stockpiles over a decade ago. No one cares until it’s their problem.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  In a pandemic situation where a hospital worker should be using a new mask with each transition to a different patient, they would be using tens of thousands of masks per day per hospital for a decent sized hospital. At that rate even the 85 million masks is just a drop in the bucket.
  - stevehawk 6y ago
    If we're going to argue that then take it to its next logical step and just argue that we shouldn't stockpile them at all. I get that the current guy screwed the pooch by not doing what should have been done, but we should also acknowledge that people prior to him also made mistakes and learn from them so we don't repeat it.
    - ZanyProgrammer 6y ago
      But the current guy is THE CURRENT GUY. 2009 Barack Obama isn't the president in September 2020.
    - Consultant32452 6y ago
      Two things can be true at once. It can be true that we should have stockpiles. It can also be true that such stockpiles are only ever going to be sufficient for relatively contained outbreaks like H1N1.
      - kevinmchugh 6y ago
        Don't the stockpiles help contain outbreaks?
        Consultant32452 6y ago
        Only in the sense that it could help prevent healthcare workers themselves from becoming carriers. If the disease is "in the wild" and has already gotten past the capacity of contact tracing and containment procedures, it's a moot point.
      - stevehawk 6y ago
        I agree, and that was my point. You seemed to brush off that a previous leader made a mistake because it was less significant than a current leader. I'm saying it's important to recognize that both messed up and in the future we should avoid both mistakes.
  - 6y ago
- James_Henry 6y ago
  > No one cares until it’s their problem. I mean, someone cared because we used to have a stockpile. What's wrong with the government today compared to decades ago?
- ZanyProgrammer 6y ago
  I see you're much more caustic towards the administration that hasn't been in power for almost 4 years than the actual president who has been in office for almost 4 years.
  - wil421 6y ago
    Not really I am pointing out that both ignored Public Health officials from the beginning.
- dariusj18 6y ago
  I'm confused, how does funding the invention of a machine to enable the mass production of masks mean they don't care? Seems to me that the idea was solving problem A meant solving problem B. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/halyard-health-awarded-federal-contract-to-research-and-develop-high-speed-machine-to-produce-respirators-for-use-during-pandemics-300191307.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/halyard-health-awar... > "All government agencies agree that a shortage of respirators will occur during a pandemic. So, we have a real opportunity to demonstrate our expertise and help make a difference in an area of critical need by performing research on the ability to develop an on-demand, high-speed machine that will make use of stockpiled raw materials to produce respirators."
  - wil421 6y ago
    We are talking about the masks specifically. Public health officials cautioned 2 administrations about the US lacking the ability to readily produce masks in the event of a crisis. Specifically saying everything is now in Asia.
    - dariusj18 6y ago
      Yes, and as a result, the US government contracted a company to develop a machine to be able to create 1.5 million masks per day. Instead of having a stockpile, which itself is not a guarantee of having enough masks, this seems to be the logical path forward. Meaning that those warnings in 2013 and 2014 were heeded and acted on by creating this contract in 2015 (and apparently they contracted two separate companies). Perhaps you misinterpreted the term respirator to not mean mask?
bachmeier 6y ago
> 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand Until the next pandemic. We can spend hundreds of billions on national defense, but N95 mask machines for protection in a pandemic is where we draw the line?
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  >> 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand It's September. We (the informed public) knew that the pandemic was likely going to be a major problem at this time in February, which is 7 months ago. The government probably knew a month before that. We've already had a lot more than 6 months. And I really suspect it could be done faster in an emergency situation where you can pay all the workers overtime.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    “The government” isn’t a person. It can’t know things. It’s a complex, chaotic system of various people with competing interests who know things at different times and have power over different things.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      Which is why we elect leaders of government who have more power to direct the internal machinations of government than we do directly.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    Also, based on our leadership (and the likely reelection of that leadership) and how many Americans are refusing to follow basic sensible health guidance, this pandemic is going to go on for at least another year, maybe multiple years. It makes sense to start now if the payout is 6 months later.
    - Consultant32452 6y ago
      Amortization on these facilities is not 6 months. It's years, likely a decade or more. There's only two companies in the whole world with the expertise to make these machines. And the machines have a high failure rate. Every nation on the planet is demanding more capacity. Do you believe that the very tiny number of people who are capable of expanding production capacity are just sitting on their laurels? This is categorically different than building something like a tank where most of the parts can be built in any machine shop. You have to assume that every country on the planet, not just the US, has the same problem you're ascribing to the US. That they could just order new production capacity into existence, but they are choosing not to.
eadmund 6y ago
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. Allowing mask manufacturers to charge the market price for their masks, though, might have made it worthwhile to build out the necessary capacity (I am pretty sure that it would have, but I could be wrong, so I will hedge my bets). But then, grandstanding politicians would have claimed it was 'price-gouging' (which simply cannot exist) and might even have tried to send the mask-makers to jail. Who would take that risk?
- gridlockd 6y ago
  The market price is still too volatile to make such decisions. This is the problem that options trading solves, but we don't have an options market for N95 masks. Even if we did, there would be tons of complaints about speculators turning a profit on people's health.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  So the reason we don't have masks is because the "Free Market" was constrained by the government? You do understand that increasing the price of masks will restrict their availability right, which to some hospitals will be as good as having no masks at all right?
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    As the parent said, a rising price will more efficiently allocate a scarce resource and ensure that people only purchase what is actually needed. Additionally, this will signal the market to produce more. A large hospital conglomerate could sign a deal with an upstart manufacturing firm to get the masks from the newly formed line. They could strike a deal that reduces risk for each party. It's unlikely the Hospital will never need these in the future, so it's not like they're throwing money away.
    - komali2 6y ago
      Sounds like the smart solutions is to cut out this nebulous middle-man that must be motivated by ambiguous signals that we aren't actually sure will work, and instead just produce the masks directly. That is to say, seems like we could have avoided this mess by the state itself producing the necessary PPE. EDIT: If you disagree, tell me why. "Capitalists" and "communists" both are getting downvoted in this thread for what I assume are ideological reasons and it's annoying me.
XorNot 6y ago
The DPA is designed to exactly fix this problem: provide guaranteed price and guaranteed quantity contracts to ensure that manufacturers can always justifiably tool up and produce what's needed. The government takes on the risk that it might not be needed. Of course seeing as how it's a paper mask with a near indefinite shelf-life given proper storage and the US should be maintaining a proper stockpile anyway, that's not much risk.
- throwaway9870 6y ago
  I don't understand why one needs the DPA for this. Just issue a PO for a suitable value so that a vendor decides it is worth it economically. Attach the delivery schedule that is desired. If it isn't possible or it is a bad economic move for the company, then the DPA isn't going to work out well anyways. This is operations 101. They tried to do something like this with Kodak, but the crooks at Kodak screwed it up.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    The benefit isn't just applying it directly to the mask maker, it's also applying it recursively to everyone that does things the mask producer needs. The mask producer needs a second production line, but the land they need isn't for sale? Boom, now it is. The mask producer can't meet parking minimums for their new line, or haven't completed an environmental impact assessment? Start building, we'll take care of it. The mask producer needs a load of elastic, but their elastic supplier is busy making sunglasses holders for a car maker? No problem, go ahead and jump the queue. Mask factory workers can't get to work, because the busses aren't running, because it's not economic to run them? They are now. Needless to say, with modern international supply chains this might be less useful than it has been in the past - no way to jump a queue using the DPA if your supplier isn't under its jurisdiction.
    - throwaway9870 6y ago
      Rather than wrecking havoc by taking people's land and forcing changes to their production plans, how about just paying the true costs of those changes and everyone doing it because it is in their best interests? How much has the government spent on this virus to date? 3T? It would not be hard to pay the market rate required to make this happen. That is how EVERY other program, defense and space included, have worked for decades.
oasisbob 6y ago
Is the bottleneck really at the production of bulk spun polypropylene textiles? I always figured the bottleneck would be actual mask assembly -- ultrasonic welding and the like.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
Your link is labeled March 16th. We knew of COVID months before that.
christkv 6y ago
I remember this article a long time ago just about it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-days-of-the-pandemic-the-us-government-turned-down-an-offer-to-manufacture-millions-of-n95-masks-in-america/2020/05/09/f76a821e-908a-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-da... Basically no willingness to commit to buying enough volume for it to make sense for production to ramp up. Slap a massive tariff on any medical equipment from China and you'll get local producers that can meet the demand. Without it who is willing to chance bankruptcy for a short term "possible" boost in sales.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  I'm not even sure a tariff on China would help? Just Devil's Advocate, but what's to stop those companies from outsourcing their manufacturing to Indonesia or South Korea instead? And if you tariff those two, what's to stop them from outsourcing to Malaysia or Brazil? And on and on. On items like PPE, where you can sell large amounts of those anywhere in the world, manufacturers will always game to match cost of manufacture to market price. So if it's known that Indonesia and Kenya are definitely going to be buying crazy amounts of your product if the price per unit matches their economic reality, someone's always going to try to meet that demand. Millions and millions of pennies is still a lot of money. Plus you can sell the same PPE you manufactured at low cost into the EU and US. It's just too profitable. I suppose you could slap a tariff on PPE from anywhere other than the US? That would probably work.
  - christkv 6y ago
    I think we are going to have to do this in all western countries. Healthcare equipment is just too critical to leave to the corporate accountants to profit maximise.
wbl 6y ago
The pandemic started in January. If we'd waited until the first shutdowns to start those machines would be online now. Making planes is hard. We made one bomber an hour at Rouge River by the end of the war.
justin66 6y ago
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. Government certainly can change this reality (perhaps via the defense production act) by agreeing to buy masks off the line for a time after the immediate demand has been met. Or whatever. None of this stuff - for example, defense contractors being managed by the government and permitted to make a reasonable but not excessive profit during wartime, or the early and middle stages of the cold war - is even especially complicated. It's an ideological prohibition against the government managing a company's profits in a specific area, and of course globalization of the relevant corporations, that prevents us from doing it. I'm not sure about the globalization part - I expect 3M and other conglomerates would be happy to work things out if they were dealing with people in the federal government who were even approaching sane, trustworthy and intelligent. Instead they encountered this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/us/jared-kushner-fema-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/us/jared-kushner-fema-cor...
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  In WWII we tooled up to make tanks, ships, and planes in less time than we've now failed to tool up just to make masks. Which, needless to say, are less complex than tanks, ships, and planes, and our level of manufacturing technology is now much higher too.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Manufacturing has changed. Back then everything was done by hand - vast changeovers were much easier.. Plus the machines already existed. They weren't making tanks in textile mills....they were making them in car plants.
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      Making rifles involves literal tons of highly specialized tool machines that are only used for making rifles. Just look at a barrel or action and try to figure out how these were machined accurately in the 1920s.
newacct583 6y ago
That doesn't seem to explain why the rest of the industrialized world isn't seeing the same shortages.
- jk700 6y ago
  Yep, it's more like a post justification bullshit. I believe the more realistic reason is that N95 masks are produced by a monopoly that doesn't want neither expand production to satisfy short term rise in demand nor give up its monopolistic position for others to do it, hence the shortage of masks in the country where it has monopoly. (There isn't a shortage of masks in my country and hasn't been for months.)
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago
  There are shortages everywhere... a surgical mask used to cost ~5eurocents here, now it's ~60 for "non medical", and 1eur+ for medical masks. N95 go even higher in price, compared to very cheap before. Yes, they're available, but at that price, noone buys them (they improvise or buy washable).
dragontamer 6y ago
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. When does the USA plan to replenish its stockpile of 100M masks? I would assume that demand will remain high until our stockpiles are replenished, which will be months (maybe years) after COVID19. If this fact isn't clear, then our leaders should make it clear by passing a law ensuring the purchasing of N95 masks until the 100M stockpile is replenished.
discordance 6y ago
It’s also a political issue in the US. I’m sure whatever supply issues could be sorted out if masks and maga hats were compatible
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  What is your hypothesis for why the UK, Germany, France, Russia, China, etc. have not been able to simply dictate sufficient capacity? Even if we assume the US is going to be uniquely awful in this regard, we could just buy from those countries if they had all been able to dictate capacity. They haven't.
  - phaemon 6y ago
    I'm not aware of any shortage of masks in the UK now. There was at the start. You can buy a pack of 10 FFP2 masks (the EU equivalent of N95) on Amazon right now (ships from Germany): https://smile.amazon.co.uk/medisana-Respiratory-Protection-3-Layer-Individually/dp/B086Y19CK6/ https://smile.amazon.co.uk/medisana-Respiratory-Protection-3... Perhaps they've not got the US certification and therefore US hospitals can't legally use them? Doesn't stop anyone buying some for their family though.
CydeWeys 6y ago
This kind of widespread attitude is a stunning reversal from the American exceptionalism of decades past. What do we call it, American fatalism? American incompetence? In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? > The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. We're more than 6 months into the pandemic at this point and no sign of reaching the end. Under a different administration, the Defense Production Act would have been invoked immediately at the outset, onshore manufacturing capability of PPE would have been dramatically ramped up, and it would now already be paying dividends (more than 6 months later!) in the form of significantly increased onshore production of N95 masks and other PPE. So yes, invoking the DPA absolutely would have changed the reality. The problem is that we didn't do it, not that doing it wouldn't have worked (it would have).
- swalsh 6y ago
  I wonder if maybe one of the differences is this has always seemed "temporary"... Or at least that is how it has been portrayed. We're just in that period before we have a vaccine, and everything goes back to normal. When you think we're only a few months away, making huge investments like that doesn't seem to make sense. But WW2 was an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the war will come over here and our country will be destroyed.
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    A global pandemic is an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the disease will take over here and our country will be destroyed. I live in New York, I can say for NYC took this seriously (eventually) and it still looks like someone Thanos-snapped half the economic activity in the city. Now imagine if the city had kept on its initial path by not taking the virus seriously and leaving hospitals so full they couldn't even handle the dead bodies anymore?
- vorpalhex 6y ago
efficax 6y ago
Damn, 6 months? Well the pandemic will definitely be over 6 months after it started so no point in ramping up production.
Andhurati 6y ago
How much do these machines cost?
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  Cost isn't the problem. The problem is that there's only two companies in the world with the technical expertise to make these machines, they have a high failure rate, and literally every country on the planet simultaneously demanded new production capacity. I admit, I don't know for certain, but I feel very confident that the tiny number of people with applicable expertise are extremely busy right now.
game_the0ry 6y ago
This is a sad comment, but indicative of where America is today. Past generations put men on the moon with less compute power than an iphone. Manhattan project, WW2, space program, interstate highway system, etc. This country has done great things (operative word being done). Our generation doesn't want to produce its own health care products because it may not be cost effective. What a lack of ambition.
brown9-2 6y ago
We’ve been dealing with the pandemic in America now for more than 6 months, and even the most optimistic timeline for a vaccine will leave us with a long period of time while hundreds of millions - really bullions - of doses are manufactured and distributed. Imagine if we had ramped up N95 production in March.
ashtonkem 6y ago
No amount of invoking the DPA would change this reality today, but if it had been invoked six months ago it would have us in a much better place now. The entire point of the DPA is to encourage and finance manufacturing of items that are strategically important but not massively profitable, partially by funding the investments required to make the initial machinery.
dpweb 6y ago
There is UNLIMITED money available to the government to fight this pandemic. The Fed simply prints the money, as they have, in the trillions of dollars since it began. Money is not the issue. The government has not made masks a priority. Biden won't do much better - I suspect he's pretty inept. Production isn't the issue either - if you wave enough money in front of the private sector, they will do anything. Prez simply makes a statement - every person will have N95 masks available to them - and we're going to do whatever we need to do to make that happen. It's better politically to guarantee everyone a $1200 check. This pandemic reveals the weaknesses in our systems.
bleepblorp 6y ago
There are very, very few people, with decisionmaking power who not tightly tied to Trumpworld, who believe the pandemic will be over in six months. The best case timeline for mass vaccinations looks like late 2021 at the earliest, which is considerably longer than six months from today, much less six months from when the pandemic started. Further, government funding would entirely change the economics of ramping up mask production. If government was paying the bills, it wouldn't matter to manufacturers if demand disappeared before new production capability had paid for itself, because government was paying the bill.
throwaway894345 6y ago
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. Isn't this the point of the DPA? The government promises private industry that they will buy a certain amount of product to make it worth industry's while to increase production as though the crisis (and thus demand) were going to last more than 6 months? And I get that the machinery takes 6 months to assemble, but that's because everything was designed for a world where the demand for masks didn't rise or fall so dramatically; however, if we could build an atomic bomb in short order, surely we could figure out how to expedite the construction of fancy cotton candy machines in 2020?
pjc50 6y ago
As others have pointed out, while N95 is best it seems to be posssible to substantially reduce transmission with masks of other materials. The earlier SARS countries of Thailand and Vietnam have responded very effectively to the pandemic, and I don't think they have a magic N95 supply.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
But why, why all these complexity issues are not applicable to China which literally floods the world with masks?
fblp 6y ago
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. I'm surprised no one in the comments so far has challenged that these machines actually take 6 months to build. There would literally be hundreds of suppliers of the components of these machines around the world - and the process of making the masks and fabric is not rocket science: https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/plant-facility-equipment/how-to-make-n95-masks/#register https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/plant-facility-equipment/...
NoOneNew 6y ago
>This is a complexity issue. Yup, and lots of folks here are missing that point or don't appreciate it enough. While I've never dealt with N95 masks or anything medical, there's a few things that immediately pop into my mind. 1. What's the certification process to get "N95"? From the body armor world (I was in it for just a little while years ago, things may have changed in the last 5+ years), getting NIJ certified is not completely simple. It's a time consuming process to get and keep standards (testing and manufacturing) to keep a ballistic grade. 1-3 months for new testing when the labs aren't swamped with armor to test (first timers in the field get "extra" testing). Since a N95 mask is life safety, I assume there's a process of submitting to 3rd party labs for quality, gov inspection of your manufacturing process and the batch testing against with 3rd party labs. How long does it take and how much does it cost? Just because you're finally up and running 6 months later, doesn't mean you're done. It would suck to do all that, then have the current leaders just steam roll your little operation's ass to crippling debt and layoffs. 2. What are the material requirements and how's that supply chain looking? If "everyone" is making N95 masks, how hard is it to even get the qualified materials needed? It would suck to pay all the money for equipment, training, personnel and the lab testing fees, then find out you can't even get enough stock of the materials. Then just to enter a completely flooded field. Older players get first dibs from distributors due to prior relationships both in time and yearly purchase amounts. That's the two things off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure there's more, bigger issues I'm ignorant of. Now, do I believe that there should be an "strategic supply of smaller manufacturers" that are prepped pre-crisis to fulfill such needs? Absol-fucking-lutely. But that's to be setup pre-crisis. Not during. Covid is a wake up call on the manufacturing needs of the USA. Any argument that globalization will save the USA in crisis is now dead and out the window. This applies to every other country too. Covid showed that every country has to think their own country first before they can help others. Situations like these makes things way more complicated and difficult on an already complex, fragile system. Just In Time Inventory only works if everything is "good and stable". While I love LEAN and understand the economic advantage of JIT, you still have to plan for big fuck ups, whether you like it or not. Reality doesn't seem to care what we all like. Covid so far has been a love-tap of problem. If this was worse than a 0.5% yearly infection rate and worse than a 2% death rate, there would have been some serious, long term problems that we don't even want to imagine.
ijidak 6y ago
Ok. But aren't KN95 masks and N95 effectively the same? There doesn't seem to be any shortage of KN95 masks. There are dozens of boxes of them at my local Lowe's. So, why is the nurse in this story wearing an N95 for weeks, instead of wearing the plentiful KN95 mask? Am I missing something?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I don't think you are, since some organizations have indeed fixed their mask shortage by authorizing KN95s. Others, it seems, prefer to stay in conservation mode so their procurement departments don't have to deal with an extra K on the forms. The article makes some vague reference to problems which forced health organizations to abandon KN95s, but this is the first I'm hearing of it and there's not enough information to look up what they're talking about.
- jsight 6y ago
  The article says it is because of the fit of those masks. From what I've seen, most use ear loops and that isn't really acceptable.
  - tzs 6y ago
    I don't have an N95 to compare to, but I can say this: when I had to go outside during the heavy wildfire smoke in the Seattle area last week (AQI over 200), if I put on an ear loop KN95 before stepping outside I could not smell a difference between outside and inside. I had an air purifier running indoors which kept my indoor air to around the equivalent of AQI 10 or better most of the time. (I say equivalent because my particulate matter sensor gives ug/m^3 and counts/cm^3, not AQI, so I had to estimate AQI). If I took the mask off outside, the difference between outside AQI 200+ and indoor AQI 10 was immediately apparent. For everyone who is not in some job with a high risk of prolonged COVID exposure, I'd recommend going ahead and getting a KN95 even if it uses ear loops and so won't be as protective as an N95. It will still be a lot better than surgical-style masks or most homemade masks. Use the cheaper surgical-style masks if most other people around you are also wearing masks. That's the case here for 99% of the people I see in the grocery store. But I'm not confident that people will keep that up for as long as the science says we need to--we Americans have a habit of ending things too soon. If mask wearing falls off before it should, I've got my box of KN95s to switch to.

mattacular 6y ago

Pretty sure there is still going to be demand in 6 months.

wil421 6y ago

> The Department of Health and Human Services did fund the invention of a “one-of-a-kind, high-speed machine” that could make 1.5 million N95s per day. But when the design was completed in 2018, the Trump administration did not purchase it. The administration had a chance to buy machines that could do it but chose not to. Hindsight is 20/20. > Except that in 2009, while Fuller was in his first job out of college, the H1N1 flu epidemic depleted 85 million N95s from the national stockpile — and the supply was never replenished. In 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017, public health officials published alarming reports warning of a “massive gap” in what remained. Even more concerning, they said, the vast majority of N95s and the materials needed to manufacture them were now being made in Asia. The previous administration didn’t care either and chose to not replenish stockpiles over a decade ago. No one cares until it’s their problem.

Consultant32452 6y ago
In a pandemic situation where a hospital worker should be using a new mask with each transition to a different patient, they would be using tens of thousands of masks per day per hospital for a decent sized hospital. At that rate even the 85 million masks is just a drop in the bucket.
- stevehawk 6y ago
  If we're going to argue that then take it to its next logical step and just argue that we shouldn't stockpile them at all. I get that the current guy screwed the pooch by not doing what should have been done, but we should also acknowledge that people prior to him also made mistakes and learn from them so we don't repeat it.
  - ZanyProgrammer 6y ago
    But the current guy is THE CURRENT GUY. 2009 Barack Obama isn't the president in September 2020.
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    Two things can be true at once. It can be true that we should have stockpiles. It can also be true that such stockpiles are only ever going to be sufficient for relatively contained outbreaks like H1N1.
    - kevinmchugh 6y ago
      Don't the stockpiles help contain outbreaks?
      - Consultant32452 6y ago
        Only in the sense that it could help prevent healthcare workers themselves from becoming carriers. If the disease is "in the wild" and has already gotten past the capacity of contact tracing and containment procedures, it's a moot point.
    - stevehawk 6y ago
      I agree, and that was my point. You seemed to brush off that a previous leader made a mistake because it was less significant than a current leader. I'm saying it's important to recognize that both messed up and in the future we should avoid both mistakes.
- 6y ago
James_Henry 6y ago
> No one cares until it’s their problem. I mean, someone cared because we used to have a stockpile. What's wrong with the government today compared to decades ago?
ZanyProgrammer 6y ago
I see you're much more caustic towards the administration that hasn't been in power for almost 4 years than the actual president who has been in office for almost 4 years.
- wil421 6y ago
  Not really I am pointing out that both ignored Public Health officials from the beginning.
dariusj18 6y ago
I'm confused, how does funding the invention of a machine to enable the mass production of masks mean they don't care? Seems to me that the idea was solving problem A meant solving problem B. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/halyard-health-awarded-federal-contract-to-research-and-develop-high-speed-machine-to-produce-respirators-for-use-during-pandemics-300191307.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/halyard-health-awar... > "All government agencies agree that a shortage of respirators will occur during a pandemic. So, we have a real opportunity to demonstrate our expertise and help make a difference in an area of critical need by performing research on the ability to develop an on-demand, high-speed machine that will make use of stockpiled raw materials to produce respirators."
- wil421 6y ago
  We are talking about the masks specifically. Public health officials cautioned 2 administrations about the US lacking the ability to readily produce masks in the event of a crisis. Specifically saying everything is now in Asia.
  - dariusj18 6y ago
    Yes, and as a result, the US government contracted a company to develop a machine to be able to create 1.5 million masks per day. Instead of having a stockpile, which itself is not a guarantee of having enough masks, this seems to be the logical path forward. Meaning that those warnings in 2013 and 2014 were heeded and acted on by creating this contract in 2015 (and apparently they contracted two separate companies). Perhaps you misinterpreted the term respirator to not mean mask?

bachmeier 6y ago

> 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand Until the next pandemic. We can spend hundreds of billions on national defense, but N95 mask machines for protection in a pandemic is where we draw the line?

Robotbeat 6y ago
>> 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand It's September. We (the informed public) knew that the pandemic was likely going to be a major problem at this time in February, which is 7 months ago. The government probably knew a month before that. We've already had a lot more than 6 months. And I really suspect it could be done faster in an emergency situation where you can pay all the workers overtime.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  “The government” isn’t a person. It can’t know things. It’s a complex, chaotic system of various people with competing interests who know things at different times and have power over different things.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    Which is why we elect leaders of government who have more power to direct the internal machinations of government than we do directly.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Also, based on our leadership (and the likely reelection of that leadership) and how many Americans are refusing to follow basic sensible health guidance, this pandemic is going to go on for at least another year, maybe multiple years. It makes sense to start now if the payout is 6 months later.
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    Amortization on these facilities is not 6 months. It's years, likely a decade or more. There's only two companies in the whole world with the expertise to make these machines. And the machines have a high failure rate. Every nation on the planet is demanding more capacity. Do you believe that the very tiny number of people who are capable of expanding production capacity are just sitting on their laurels? This is categorically different than building something like a tank where most of the parts can be built in any machine shop. You have to assume that every country on the planet, not just the US, has the same problem you're ascribing to the US. That they could just order new production capacity into existence, but they are choosing not to.

eadmund 6y ago

> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. Allowing mask manufacturers to charge the market price for their masks, though, might have made it worthwhile to build out the necessary capacity (I am pretty sure that it would have, but I could be wrong, so I will hedge my bets). But then, grandstanding politicians would have claimed it was 'price-gouging' (which simply cannot exist) and might even have tried to send the mask-makers to jail. Who would take that risk?

gridlockd 6y ago
The market price is still too volatile to make such decisions. This is the problem that options trading solves, but we don't have an options market for N95 masks. Even if we did, there would be tons of complaints about speculators turning a profit on people's health.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
So the reason we don't have masks is because the "Free Market" was constrained by the government? You do understand that increasing the price of masks will restrict their availability right, which to some hospitals will be as good as having no masks at all right?
- linuxftw 6y ago
  As the parent said, a rising price will more efficiently allocate a scarce resource and ensure that people only purchase what is actually needed. Additionally, this will signal the market to produce more. A large hospital conglomerate could sign a deal with an upstart manufacturing firm to get the masks from the newly formed line. They could strike a deal that reduces risk for each party. It's unlikely the Hospital will never need these in the future, so it's not like they're throwing money away.
  - komali2 6y ago
    Sounds like the smart solutions is to cut out this nebulous middle-man that must be motivated by ambiguous signals that we aren't actually sure will work, and instead just produce the masks directly. That is to say, seems like we could have avoided this mess by the state itself producing the necessary PPE. EDIT: If you disagree, tell me why. "Capitalists" and "communists" both are getting downvoted in this thread for what I assume are ideological reasons and it's annoying me.

XorNot 6y ago

The DPA is designed to exactly fix this problem: provide guaranteed price and guaranteed quantity contracts to ensure that manufacturers can always justifiably tool up and produce what's needed. The government takes on the risk that it might not be needed. Of course seeing as how it's a paper mask with a near indefinite shelf-life given proper storage and the US should be maintaining a proper stockpile anyway, that's not much risk.

throwaway9870 6y ago
I don't understand why one needs the DPA for this. Just issue a PO for a suitable value so that a vendor decides it is worth it economically. Attach the delivery schedule that is desired. If it isn't possible or it is a bad economic move for the company, then the DPA isn't going to work out well anyways. This is operations 101. They tried to do something like this with Kodak, but the crooks at Kodak screwed it up.
- michaelt 6y ago
  The benefit isn't just applying it directly to the mask maker, it's also applying it recursively to everyone that does things the mask producer needs. The mask producer needs a second production line, but the land they need isn't for sale? Boom, now it is. The mask producer can't meet parking minimums for their new line, or haven't completed an environmental impact assessment? Start building, we'll take care of it. The mask producer needs a load of elastic, but their elastic supplier is busy making sunglasses holders for a car maker? No problem, go ahead and jump the queue. Mask factory workers can't get to work, because the busses aren't running, because it's not economic to run them? They are now. Needless to say, with modern international supply chains this might be less useful than it has been in the past - no way to jump a queue using the DPA if your supplier isn't under its jurisdiction.
  - throwaway9870 6y ago
    Rather than wrecking havoc by taking people's land and forcing changes to their production plans, how about just paying the true costs of those changes and everyone doing it because it is in their best interests? How much has the government spent on this virus to date? 3T? It would not be hard to pay the market rate required to make this happen. That is how EVERY other program, defense and space included, have worked for decades.

oasisbob 6y ago

Is the bottleneck really at the production of bulk spun polypropylene textiles? I always figured the bottleneck would be actual mask assembly -- ultrasonic welding and the like.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago

Your link is labeled March 16th. We knew of COVID months before that.

christkv 6y ago

I remember this article a long time ago just about it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-days-of-the-pandemic-the-us-government-turned-down-an-offer-to-manufacture-millions-of-n95-masks-in-america/2020/05/09/f76a821e-908a-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/in-the-early-da... Basically no willingness to commit to buying enough volume for it to make sense for production to ramp up. Slap a massive tariff on any medical equipment from China and you'll get local producers that can meet the demand. Without it who is willing to chance bankruptcy for a short term "possible" boost in sales.

bilbo0s 6y ago
I'm not even sure a tariff on China would help? Just Devil's Advocate, but what's to stop those companies from outsourcing their manufacturing to Indonesia or South Korea instead? And if you tariff those two, what's to stop them from outsourcing to Malaysia or Brazil? And on and on. On items like PPE, where you can sell large amounts of those anywhere in the world, manufacturers will always game to match cost of manufacture to market price. So if it's known that Indonesia and Kenya are definitely going to be buying crazy amounts of your product if the price per unit matches their economic reality, someone's always going to try to meet that demand. Millions and millions of pennies is still a lot of money. Plus you can sell the same PPE you manufactured at low cost into the EU and US. It's just too profitable. I suppose you could slap a tariff on PPE from anywhere other than the US? That would probably work.
- christkv 6y ago
  I think we are going to have to do this in all western countries. Healthcare equipment is just too critical to leave to the corporate accountants to profit maximise.

wbl 6y ago

The pandemic started in January. If we'd waited until the first shutdowns to start those machines would be online now. Making planes is hard. We made one bomber an hour at Rouge River by the end of the war.

justin66 6y ago

> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. Government certainly can change this reality (perhaps via the defense production act) by agreeing to buy masks off the line for a time after the immediate demand has been met. Or whatever. None of this stuff - for example, defense contractors being managed by the government and permitted to make a reasonable but not excessive profit during wartime, or the early and middle stages of the cold war - is even especially complicated. It's an ideological prohibition against the government managing a company's profits in a specific area, and of course globalization of the relevant corporations, that prevents us from doing it. I'm not sure about the globalization part - I expect 3M and other conglomerates would be happy to work things out if they were dealing with people in the federal government who were even approaching sane, trustworthy and intelligent. Instead they encountered this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/us/jared-kushner-fema-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/us/jared-kushner-fema-cor...

CydeWeys 6y ago
In WWII we tooled up to make tanks, ships, and planes in less time than we've now failed to tool up just to make masks. Which, needless to say, are less complex than tanks, ships, and planes, and our level of manufacturing technology is now much higher too.
- TylerE 6y ago
  Manufacturing has changed. Back then everything was done by hand - vast changeovers were much easier.. Plus the machines already existed. They weren't making tanks in textile mills....they were making them in car plants.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    Making rifles involves literal tons of highly specialized tool machines that are only used for making rifles. Just look at a barrel or action and try to figure out how these were machined accurately in the 1920s.

newacct583 6y ago

That doesn't seem to explain why the rest of the industrialized world isn't seeing the same shortages.

jk700 6y ago
Yep, it's more like a post justification bullshit. I believe the more realistic reason is that N95 masks are produced by a monopoly that doesn't want neither expand production to satisfy short term rise in demand nor give up its monopolistic position for others to do it, hence the shortage of masks in the country where it has monopoly. (There isn't a shortage of masks in my country and hasn't been for months.)
ajsnigrutin 6y ago
There are shortages everywhere... a surgical mask used to cost ~5eurocents here, now it's ~60 for "non medical", and 1eur+ for medical masks. N95 go even higher in price, compared to very cheap before. Yes, they're available, but at that price, noone buys them (they improvise or buy washable).

dragontamer 6y ago

> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. When does the USA plan to replenish its stockpile of 100M masks? I would assume that demand will remain high until our stockpiles are replenished, which will be months (maybe years) after COVID19. If this fact isn't clear, then our leaders should make it clear by passing a law ensuring the purchasing of N95 masks until the 100M stockpile is replenished.

discordance 6y ago

It’s also a political issue in the US. I’m sure whatever supply issues could be sorted out if masks and maga hats were compatible

Consultant32452 6y ago
What is your hypothesis for why the UK, Germany, France, Russia, China, etc. have not been able to simply dictate sufficient capacity? Even if we assume the US is going to be uniquely awful in this regard, we could just buy from those countries if they had all been able to dictate capacity. They haven't.
- phaemon 6y ago
  I'm not aware of any shortage of masks in the UK now. There was at the start. You can buy a pack of 10 FFP2 masks (the EU equivalent of N95) on Amazon right now (ships from Germany): https://smile.amazon.co.uk/medisana-Respiratory-Protection-3-Layer-Individually/dp/B086Y19CK6/ https://smile.amazon.co.uk/medisana-Respiratory-Protection-3... Perhaps they've not got the US certification and therefore US hospitals can't legally use them? Doesn't stop anyone buying some for their family though.

CydeWeys 6y ago

This kind of widespread attitude is a stunning reversal from the American exceptionalism of decades past. What do we call it, American fatalism? American incompetence? In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? > The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. We're more than 6 months into the pandemic at this point and no sign of reaching the end. Under a different administration, the Defense Production Act would have been invoked immediately at the outset, onshore manufacturing capability of PPE would have been dramatically ramped up, and it would now already be paying dividends (more than 6 months later!) in the form of significantly increased onshore production of N95 masks and other PPE. So yes, invoking the DPA absolutely would have changed the reality. The problem is that we didn't do it, not that doing it wouldn't have worked (it would have).

swalsh 6y ago
I wonder if maybe one of the differences is this has always seemed "temporary"... Or at least that is how it has been portrayed. We're just in that period before we have a vaccine, and everything goes back to normal. When you think we're only a few months away, making huge investments like that doesn't seem to make sense. But WW2 was an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the war will come over here and our country will be destroyed.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  A global pandemic is an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the disease will take over here and our country will be destroyed. I live in New York, I can say for NYC took this seriously (eventually) and it still looks like someone Thanos-snapped half the economic activity in the city. Now imagine if the city had kept on its initial path by not taking the virus seriously and leaving hospitals so full they couldn't even handle the dead bodies anymore?
vorpalhex 6y ago

efficax 6y ago

Damn, 6 months? Well the pandemic will definitely be over 6 months after it started so no point in ramping up production.

Andhurati 6y ago

How much do these machines cost?

Consultant32452 6y ago
Cost isn't the problem. The problem is that there's only two companies in the world with the technical expertise to make these machines, they have a high failure rate, and literally every country on the planet simultaneously demanded new production capacity. I admit, I don't know for certain, but I feel very confident that the tiny number of people with applicable expertise are extremely busy right now.

game_the0ry 6y ago

This is a sad comment, but indicative of where America is today. Past generations put men on the moon with less compute power than an iphone. Manhattan project, WW2, space program, interstate highway system, etc. This country has done great things (operative word being done). Our generation doesn't want to produce its own health care products because it may not be cost effective. What a lack of ambition.

brown9-2 6y ago

We’ve been dealing with the pandemic in America now for more than 6 months, and even the most optimistic timeline for a vaccine will leave us with a long period of time while hundreds of millions - really bullions - of doses are manufactured and distributed. Imagine if we had ramped up N95 production in March.

ashtonkem 6y ago

No amount of invoking the DPA would change this reality today, but if it had been invoked six months ago it would have us in a much better place now. The entire point of the DPA is to encourage and finance manufacturing of items that are strategically important but not massively profitable, partially by funding the investments required to make the initial machinery.

dpweb 6y ago

There is UNLIMITED money available to the government to fight this pandemic. The Fed simply prints the money, as they have, in the trillions of dollars since it began. Money is not the issue. The government has not made masks a priority. Biden won't do much better - I suspect he's pretty inept. Production isn't the issue either - if you wave enough money in front of the private sector, they will do anything. Prez simply makes a statement - every person will have N95 masks available to them - and we're going to do whatever we need to do to make that happen. It's better politically to guarantee everyone a $1200 check. This pandemic reveals the weaknesses in our systems.

bleepblorp 6y ago

There are very, very few people, with decisionmaking power who not tightly tied to Trumpworld, who believe the pandemic will be over in six months. The best case timeline for mass vaccinations looks like late 2021 at the earliest, which is considerably longer than six months from today, much less six months from when the pandemic started. Further, government funding would entirely change the economics of ramping up mask production. If government was paying the bills, it wouldn't matter to manufacturers if demand disappeared before new production capability had paid for itself, because government was paying the bill.

throwaway894345 6y ago

> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. Isn't this the point of the DPA? The government promises private industry that they will buy a certain amount of product to make it worth industry's while to increase production as though the crisis (and thus demand) were going to last more than 6 months? And I get that the machinery takes 6 months to assemble, but that's because everything was designed for a world where the demand for masks didn't rise or fall so dramatically; however, if we could build an atomic bomb in short order, surely we could figure out how to expedite the construction of fancy cotton candy machines in 2020?

pjc50 6y ago

As others have pointed out, while N95 is best it seems to be posssible to substantially reduce transmission with masks of other materials. The earlier SARS countries of Thailand and Vietnam have responded very effectively to the pandemic, and I don't think they have a magic N95 supply.

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago

But why, why all these complexity issues are not applicable to China which literally floods the world with masks?

fblp 6y ago

> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. I'm surprised no one in the comments so far has challenged that these machines actually take 6 months to build. There would literally be hundreds of suppliers of the components of these machines around the world - and the process of making the masks and fabric is not rocket science: https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/plant-facility-equipment/how-to-make-n95-masks/#register https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/plant-facility-equipment/...

NoOneNew 6y ago

>This is a complexity issue. Yup, and lots of folks here are missing that point or don't appreciate it enough. While I've never dealt with N95 masks or anything medical, there's a few things that immediately pop into my mind. 1. What's the certification process to get "N95"? From the body armor world (I was in it for just a little while years ago, things may have changed in the last 5+ years), getting NIJ certified is not completely simple. It's a time consuming process to get and keep standards (testing and manufacturing) to keep a ballistic grade. 1-3 months for new testing when the labs aren't swamped with armor to test (first timers in the field get "extra" testing). Since a N95 mask is life safety, I assume there's a process of submitting to 3rd party labs for quality, gov inspection of your manufacturing process and the batch testing against with 3rd party labs. How long does it take and how much does it cost? Just because you're finally up and running 6 months later, doesn't mean you're done. It would suck to do all that, then have the current leaders just steam roll your little operation's ass to crippling debt and layoffs. 2. What are the material requirements and how's that supply chain looking? If "everyone" is making N95 masks, how hard is it to even get the qualified materials needed? It would suck to pay all the money for equipment, training, personnel and the lab testing fees, then find out you can't even get enough stock of the materials. Then just to enter a completely flooded field. Older players get first dibs from distributors due to prior relationships both in time and yearly purchase amounts. That's the two things off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure there's more, bigger issues I'm ignorant of. Now, do I believe that there should be an "strategic supply of smaller manufacturers" that are prepped pre-crisis to fulfill such needs? Absol-fucking-lutely. But that's to be setup pre-crisis. Not during. Covid is a wake up call on the manufacturing needs of the USA. Any argument that globalization will save the USA in crisis is now dead and out the window. This applies to every other country too. Covid showed that every country has to think their own country first before they can help others. Situations like these makes things way more complicated and difficult on an already complex, fragile system. Just In Time Inventory only works if everything is "good and stable". While I love LEAN and understand the economic advantage of JIT, you still have to plan for big fuck ups, whether you like it or not. Reality doesn't seem to care what we all like. Covid so far has been a love-tap of problem. If this was worse than a 0.5% yearly infection rate and worse than a 2% death rate, there would have been some serious, long term problems that we don't even want to imagine.

ijidak 6y ago

Ok. But aren't KN95 masks and N95 effectively the same? There doesn't seem to be any shortage of KN95 masks. There are dozens of boxes of them at my local Lowe's. So, why is the nurse in this story wearing an N95 for weeks, instead of wearing the plentiful KN95 mask? Am I missing something?

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I don't think you are, since some organizations have indeed fixed their mask shortage by authorizing KN95s. Others, it seems, prefer to stay in conservation mode so their procurement departments don't have to deal with an extra K on the forms. The article makes some vague reference to problems which forced health organizations to abandon KN95s, but this is the first I'm hearing of it and there's not enough information to look up what they're talking about.
jsight 6y ago
The article says it is because of the fit of those masks. From what I've seen, most use ear loops and that isn't really acceptable.
- tzs 6y ago
  I don't have an N95 to compare to, but I can say this: when I had to go outside during the heavy wildfire smoke in the Seattle area last week (AQI over 200), if I put on an ear loop KN95 before stepping outside I could not smell a difference between outside and inside. I had an air purifier running indoors which kept my indoor air to around the equivalent of AQI 10 or better most of the time. (I say equivalent because my particulate matter sensor gives ug/m^3 and counts/cm^3, not AQI, so I had to estimate AQI). If I took the mask off outside, the difference between outside AQI 200+ and indoor AQI 10 was immediately apparent. For everyone who is not in some job with a high risk of prolonged COVID exposure, I'd recommend going ahead and getting a KN95 even if it uses ear loops and so won't be as protective as an N95. It will still be a lot better than surgical-style masks or most homemade masks. Use the cheaper surgical-style masks if most other people around you are also wearing masks. That's the case here for 99% of the people I see in the grocery store. But I'm not confident that people will keep that up for as long as the science says we need to--we Americans have a habit of ending things too soon. If mask wearing falls off before it should, I've got my box of KN95s to switch to.