6 ms·
My understanding is that N95 masks have a shelf life (2-5 years?), so stock would need to be regularly repurchased. The bigger issue is the sheer cost of prepa
by ethbr0 4y ago
My understanding is that N95 masks have a shelf life (2-5 years?), so stock would need to be regularly repurchased.
The bigger issue is the sheer cost of preparation against an exponentially-reproducing threat.
All other disasters can be prepared for with state of the art gear because they are, by nature, limited. Ergo, a limit amount of gear can be rapidly transported to location and will suffice.
In contrast, a pandemic requires "multiple for every single person" levels of stock. Which is outside most capitalist supply bounds (i.e. no one can even produce that much stock).
- philliphaydon 4y agoJust do stock rotation. Bring stock in, release old stock to hospitals and such where it will be used right away.
- ethbr0 4y agoThink in quantities. Hospitals in normal times don't consume the number of masks you'd need to stockpile for a pandemic situation.
- philliphaydon 4y agoPossibly. But either stockpile or product them locally so production can be ramped up for local populous in the time of a pandemic. And make sending masks overseas illegal. Too many people were buying up shops of marks and sending them back to China. That hurts us even more.
- ethbr0 4y agoA ton of masks used in the US were assembled in China, because they have the manufacturing capacity and labor cost advantage, even if they were built with meltblown filters produced in the US. If the goal is pandemic preparedness, it would probably be most efficient to just build and mothball production lines, doing limited runs yearly to exercise the machinery. The government has more than enough land and warehouse space. As far as I understand, none of the components (or machinery to produce them) are particularly cutting edge... just limited because they were sized for pre-pandemic sales volume.
- Scoundreller 4y agoAt least where I am (Canada) hospitals all buy through a couple of “buying groups”, so it’s not a bad way to get rid of lots of stock quickly. N95s are used in many industries, and it’s a liquid market. Not hard to call up a big industrial distributor and say “hey, we have these masks that expire in 1yr, want to have a sale?”
- chiefalchemist 4y agoWe can invent and manufactur a bomber that evades radar. Mask are 5 to 10 orders of magnitude less involved. The only responsible excuse is incompetence or negligence. We, the USA, were completely unprepared.
- 20after4 4y agoincompetence AND negligence
- tristor 4y ago> My understanding is that N95 masks have a shelf life (2-5 years?), so stock would need to be regularly repurchased. “Shelf-life” on non-perishable goods is highly conservative and often regulated by profit motive. Millions of N95 and P95 respirators were destroyed shortly before the pandemic due to “shelf life” and yet would have been a god send compared to having nothing or treating active COVID cases with a t-shirt or bandana over your face as happened in many US hospitals. Proper planning could have rotated stock to maintain shelf life, slightly less proper planning could have realized the sheer stupidity of destroying working strategic materials due to an arbitrary and made up number.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoWe regularly enrich The MIC with over-budget weapons, certainly we can figure out how to manufacture N95 masks and rotate them as necessary. This is Respiratory Pandemic 101. It's a threshold no expert should be tolerant of and/or should fail. Any other excuse is propaganda.