I do believe these masks are also made in the US, but this situation highlights exactly why a country having its own major manufacturing base is not just an economic need but rather also a national security need. The US needs to invest in itself immediately to rebuild its lost manufacturing base.
In economic terms, under certain definitions and assumptions that are typical under modern economics, a trade war such as the current US-China trade war result in welfare losses. I believe, however, that when national security is taken into account (ie having the ability for the country to rapidly respond to productive capacity needs in a time of crisis), the trade war along with serious investment in expanding industrial capacity is likely net good.
> I do believe these masks are also made in the US, but this situation highlights exactly why a country having its own major manufacturing base is not just an economic need but rather also a national security need. The US needs to invest in itself immediately to rebuild its lost manufacturing base.
3M and Prestige Ameritech are the only companies with the ability to manufacturing N95 masks in the US from US sourced materials.
Totally agree with you on manufacturing. It's super important to have this kind of domestic manufacturing capability, because trade links break down in a crisis like this. The US is short on supply and can't import more (other countries are banning exports to conserve supply for domestic needs). If all the manufacturing capability had been outsourced, US healthcare workers would be in even worse shape.
> 3M and Prestige Ameritech are the only companies with the ability to manufacturing N95 masks in the US from US sourced materials.
I'm confused about your italics. Why does it matter where the source materials you give them comes from? i.e. Why would other manufacturers in the US be only able to manufacture masks from non-US-sourced-materials, but fail on US-sourced materials? Is there something defective with US-sourced materials that if you gave them to US-based manufacturers, their machines would break or something?
It could be a matter of having the whole process happen in the US. In the sense that those 2 companies are the only one that have sufficient domestic supply chain for production, while all other companies need to rely on import.
But if that's the case then you could get source materials from one of these companies and give them to another manufacturer who normally ships from overseas, right? Like I'm saying in that case the issue seems to be lack of sufficient source materials in the US, not US manufacturing capability?
But in any case, the supply chains of companies that use overseas materials have been disrupted. With effort, they could probably switch to using materials from a domestic manufacturer, but those manufacturers may not have the capacity to satisfy the increased demand. Per the OP, it seems like the limiting factor in production is melt-blown fabric.
The US is the 3rd largest manufacturer in the world, behind China and Germany. Wayyyyy behind China but, like, everyone is, at least when it comes to manufacturing.
We're also the number one exporter of food, and hold a few other top production laurels. Not the top producer, not the top consumer -- that's China -- but the top over-all exporter.[1]
As the above comment mentioned: most of that work is highly industrialized and automated. Less than 1% of the US is farmers but they produce enough to make US food exports #1. Much of the same is true for US manufacturing.
I think people are talking about masks, medical supplies, medicine manufacturing are all critical to the national security and should be brought back. This should be taken as a learning experience as well as a national disaster. Lest we forget in a year. Those industries can be subsidized as they are critical and we can't trust other countries for those supplies in pandemics and other world disasters.
All the workers being replaced by automation and having to rely on "gig economy" work could pursue manufacturing instead. We have the workforce.
We can pay workers livable wages and give them meaningful work. Cost of goods could be reduced through greater efficiency. Research into robotics and automation could fuel a new decade of American growth.
That's the problem - you don't. By definition, the kind of efficient, highly-automated manufacturing you're thinking of doesn't need many unskilled or semi-skilled workers, but it does need skilled and experienced engineers and machinists. It needs a massive and complex ecosystem of suppliers and support.
The depletion of America's industrial base has created a massive skills gap that would take decades to remedy. You can't create a new Silicon Valley with a bunch of bootcamp graduates and some wishful thinking; likewise, you can't create a manufacturing economy through sheer force of will.
This reminds me of a conversation I had at a New Year's party not too long ago - a gentleman I'd never met before and I got to talking, and in the process of getting to know one another (however much you can know someone after 4-5 drinks at a black tie party you go to once a year), he bemoaned the issues he was having trying to open a US branch of his company. Apparently medium scale sheet metal forming operations in the States have all but disappeared - everything is either outsourced to China, or is small scale, high precision work that can't meet demand of more than N hundred pieces a week. It's a boring issue - "oh no, there's no one to subcontract this work to, you have to buy from China for X percent of what it would cost to do here" - but speak volumes as to the loss of a critical component of that manufacturing ecosystem.
>Apparently medium scale sheet metal forming operations in the States have all but disappeared - everything is either outsourced to China, or is small scale, high precision work that can't meet demand of more than N hundred pieces a week.
I can personally confirm this. Very unfortunate, and I'm positive it's helping stifle innovation. Having to go to China for your custom sheet metal needs (with the communication difficulties and shipping times involved) can be -really- debilitating.
You can get custom sheet metal work, if you're willing the pay the price and possibly are in the right industry. Sheet metal, welding, carpentry, pipefitters, and pretty much every trade are in massive demand in shipbuilding/repair.
NNSY fails a significant portion of welder applicants just because they can't lay a proper weld. They pay... a lot of money.
"the price" being something borderline extortionate, in many cases. And there aren't a lot of options. In China there's someone everywhere that can do what you want; in America, you'll have to search.
You can get lucky and find someone with some brakes and benders that does cheap work for farmers, but people like that are usually extremely hard to find and mostly in rural areas.
And yes, welders do make more than someone at McDonalds or doing landscaping, but the myth of the super-high paid welder is mostly that. I just looked up NNSY welder salaries - average of 49K, and that's with a lot people there being experienced and there for a long time.
Completing the welding apprenticeship at NNSY results in an hourly wage of $29.73. The overtime pay schedule at NNSY. The issue online is complicated because NNSY also has "shipfitters/welders". They are paid substantially less than production welders. Production welders at a repair yard like BAE/Colanna/Lyon make in the range of $27-$30. They also make significant overtime.
I agree that the myth of the super-high paid welder is mostly fabricated, but when it comes to shipbuilding at a nuclear yard it's a lot higher than you would expect.
Driving around Newport News, Groton, or even Birmingham is like being on another planet economically speaking.
But I definitely see the point, as most of the suppliers are sized for defense, not commercial industrial volume.
And from their perspective, I get the choice. Why risk expansion, when the trend has been towards free trade and offshoring? A 100x customer who decides to switch suppliers in a year isn't a win. At least DoD is a semi-reliable customer.
Driving around Newport News is like driving around a desolate shithole. There are very few nice neighborhoods in the area. Newport News and Hampton are the worst cities in the Hampton Roads area.
I got chatting to the bloke next to me on a long haul flight from the UK to Japan. He was going there to buy a printing machine (he was a printer) and when I asked why go all the way to Japan he told me that, basically, only Germany and Japan make printing machines any more. He even pointed out that the pulp he bought was from abroad.
I wonder if freight companies receive subsidies though - lots of airlines certainly get subsidies - that might change things in favour of more local producers. Maybe.
It's because people have been pushed to both sides of that; manufacturing used to be a comfortable middle class job, but it's shifted to the sides, being a high value, specialist job on the one hand, and a low education required job of handling incoming finished or half-finished products coming over from abroad.
This, exactly. America has manufacturing talent, but not at the scale required for a manufacturing economy. (Source: ~2 decades in global manufacturing.)
Interesting. I wonder what the logic is; usually tariffs are chosen based on trade volumes with the targeted country. Maybe there's a sense that mining or other raw materials businesses need more help than firms higher up the value chain.
While this might be true, in the same decades you could have a handful of skilled machinists teach the robots / AIs. The thing about AI anything is that each individual unit gets better with fleet upgrades.
Highly-automated, "clean" manufacturing is all well and good for billion-dollar highly-capitalized, politically-sheltered megafactories, but what about the other 90% of manufacturers?
Manufacturing is a dirty, dangerous, manual business. I think the small guys will tell you that environmental regulations killed manufacturing in the west, not labour costs. We've been living in lala land with it all offshore, out of sight. If US/EU-level environmental regulations got applied and enforced globally, we'd be sent back to the stone age. Not to mention the litigation risks, intellectual property risks, trade union cartels, needing to hire an electrician to change a lightbulb, etc. (All added up, it's hopelessly calcified, but whatever...)
Don't get me wrong - I really care about the environment - but most regs here are just to look good, not actually about stuff that matters. And pushing it into the third world, where they don't protect the environment at all, is counterproductive.
>Manufacturing is a dirty, dangerous, manual business.
It can be, but it can also be clean, safe and highly automated. Fly-by-night operators that run dirty and dangerous shops are not the basis of a sustainable manufacturing economy. China is just damned good at manufacturing. They have everything that is needed - skills, capital, logistics - at an immense scale. They don't offer a cheap but inferior substitute for western manufacturing. They offer speed, flexibility and scalability that western countries could only dream of.
Xi Jinping has a degree in chemical engineering. His predecessor Hu Jintao has a degree in hydraulic engineering. His predecessor Jiang Zemin has a degree in electrical engineering. That is the fundamental reason why China is a manufacturing superpower - for thirty years, the government has been run by people who actually know how to make stuff.
Tell that to Germany, stricter environmental regulations and a very healthy, highly developed manufacturing sector. They might not have all of their supply chain made locally but Germany makes the machines that makes machines so if needed they could ramp up their internal manufacturing quite quickly, doesn't seem to be the case for the US.
Well Germany has been so fortunate as to be a member of a currency union, where they are the leading industrial base, thus giving them a artificial low currency as an advantage as well. This helps manufacturing quit a bit.
State was defined by political borders, country by geographical borders. For much of human history states were countries. The blurring of the meaning of these words I believe started around the 18th century as transportation, and thus the ability to rule further away, progressed.
I agree that in today's colloquial usage there is little distinction between the two.
That's completely insignificant compared to having the dollar as the global currency in the oil trade. Countries that sell oil for dollar can only spend those dollars on American products. It's as if the USA produced all the oil in the world and sold it for profit. Meanwhile Germany's unfair advantage is that it's prices on products are slightly lower than they should be.
It is actually the other way around: this keeps the US dollar artificially high, hitting on exports, and it is completely not true that these countries can only spend dollars on American products: they can spend on anything they want, the dollar is just a currency, you can use it to buy products from Russia, China or Nigeria.
Economists recognize Germany’s unique position that is overheating their manufacturing center. If the DM still existed, it would be ~50% more valuable than the Euro.
How can you in once sentence say we can employ workers previously displaced by automation, and in the next sentence assert that we can produce these goods at a competitive price with automation?
I should proofread and given examples. Lack of caffeine from WFH isn't helping me.
There are many types of automation. Grocery workers (cashiers, stockers) are replaced with robotics and self-checkout (which automates pricing and theft detection) that removes them from the equation. Automobile machinists and doctors are supplemented with robotics that let them do higher-precision work and avoid mundane and/or stressful tasks.
The gig economy is driven by automation (customer discovery, billing, payroll, etc.), but the industry is set up in a way that happens to produce negative externalities and push risks and costs onto workers.
We need the type of automation that reduces mindless repetition and extends human capability. Not the kind geared at removing people.
I don't understand why we insist on keeping people in jobs that can be automated. Let them go pursue something that's fulfilling. Not automating something that can be just to keep people doing jobs we don't need done is a fascinating make-work project.
The displaced should be re-trained, provided meaningful opportunities, or yeah, paid basic income out of the money saved by them not going to work.
Why pay them to do a less efficient job, that they're not fulfilled by, to produce uncompetitive goods at an uncompetitive price?
I agree with you generally, but the issue is really that we (in the US) replaced manufacturing with some combination of the perception and externalization of automation. We shipped it all overseas and said "we really don't care how you get it done, but if you can consistently do it at this price, you may as well be an 'automated' black box to us".
If it was fully automated today, we should be able to do it here. Build the same machines. Hell, buy the machines from over there, and set them up here. Then figure out how to pay everyone for the service/idea/artsy work. Whatever they wanna do, at least we can afford the masks when we need them, right? (And the healthcare, and the iPhones, and the whatever else is either absolutely necessary or has supposedly been automated.)
But it's not, so the conversation is really about how we can afford to pay people a living wage in a country with a higher cost of living when they're working as underpriced supplemental labor for not-quite-there automation.
And the reality is that we can't: we externalized that lower wage and we slapped an "automation" sticker on it so that everyone would jump on board. Then we realized that we don't own the automation AND we're eliminating the jobs that automation is replacing instead of retooling the existing jobs to ride the technology curve of said automation as its benefits start to grow.
Again, this is all a very America-centric view, but I think it applies to pockets of Europe as well. And if I was living in certain Asian countries, I think I'd be stoked as hell about the increase in wages that could continue to meet the cost of a rapidly increasing standard of living.
I should also say I'm very much in favor of free trade, and I think that mercantilism/protectionism is net negative for the global welfare of humanity. But I think there was an opportunity that a lot of short-sighted American manufacturing powerhouses missed when they agreed to sign up for the Chinese manufacturing equivalent of SaaS.
It's remarkable what you can do with automation. There's a small factory that produces a large proportion of the world's manual industrial power switches here in Helsinki.
It's basically a few machines that crank them out like no tomorrow, and then the associated personnel to keep the machines running and doing some hard to automate jobs. (Some hundreds of people perhaps.) And sales guys.
Because to me, the consumer, I can't think of a single time automation replacing humans has been better. Self checkouts suck for anything more than a handful of items, especially compared to a well trained cashier/bagger combo. Automated call/IVR systems are hypertension inducing bad. ATMs are no replacement for tellers for most situations that bring one to the bank.
I'm not a complete luddite. In many systems, specifically manufacturing, robots outcompete humans and it makes sense.
The problem arises when anything requiring the least bit of thinking is attempted to be automated. Those are nothing more than cost saving measures, and bring down the quality of service to everyone involved.
I agree that at current state almost all physical self-service systems suck. Royally. The only exceptions I can think of are petrol pumps, ATMs (please read on), and to a certain extent, ticket kiosks.
I would claim that ATMs are in fact a prime example of successful automation. For anything non-mundane you still need to go talk to a human, but that's the point: ATMs have removed the need to involve a human bottleneck for a bulk quantity of an extremely mundane task: withdrawing cash. I am old enough to remember when you had to go to the bank for that too.
This hits the nail on the head, though:
> The problem arises when anything requiring the least bit of thinking is attempted to be automated.
Humans are capable of judgment calls.[ß] Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, which is not necessarily what you want them to do.
ß: environments where humans are forbidden from making judgment calls are called bureaucracies.
It's not a matter of taste. It's a question of whether your preferred grocery store employs any experienced cashiers and baggers, and the degree to which their self-checkout machines are artificially dumbed-down and slowed-down.
In most cases, the customer-facing self checkout systems are objectively much slower and more cumbersome than the manned checkout systems that require some training and practice to use correctly. Paid cashiers never have to slow down their scanning because of a spurious reading from a scale in the bagging area. They get real keyboards to interact with the computer, and user interfaces that are far more responsive than the typical touchscreen UI's update latency.
Whiles some of that may be true, I can still get through via self-checkout faster than a manned station most of the time.
Then again, I'm not buying 57 individual items in a line 6 people deep who are all buying similar amounts of items. Perhaps you are. A matter of taste.
That’s you bud, I prefer the self check out every time, most visits to the bank are for the atm and if ai driven Uber cars were a thing I’d prefer them to. (I can agree about ivrs thou, those can die a fiery death)
We all have difference preferences so don’t attribute yours to others.
Automation really is all progress made by humans. Chainsaws replace hand-saws, and is 'automated' sawing.
The less work is required to produce goods, the better it can compete (in price). This makes it so that you _don't have to_ work as much to achieve the same quality of life
Have you used home depot's self check out machines?
They are fantastic. Leaps ahead of every supermarket and CVS I've been in. When I was doing a lot of housework and was very used to them, I could get through a check out with a couple of items in under a minute. Really proved to me that these do not need to be awful
Areas involving human interaction may indeed risk a decline in the provided (or at least perceived) quality when automated, compared to its non-automated best case scenario. However, aside from possible technical issues (that may also affect human-involved setups), machines avoid a broad range of problems (some mentioned in sibling posts) that otherwise affect clients' interacting experience, and thus (more often than not) are the better choice.
P.S.: I don't miss nowadays the increase of human-induced Coronavirus infection risk when I experience human-free services.
I mean, that just sounds like a matter of time does it not? Or a business opportunity. I can't imagine that there's some fundamental limitation to these devices that precludes a good experience.
I’m not saying we should protect these jobs by law or anything, but I question whether work that can be automated can't be fulfilling.
I keep seeing these “Cafe X” robotic coffee bars in San Francisco. Surely some baristas find their job fulfilling, and some customers enjoy chatting with their human barista instead of a robot?
Personally I think I’d have a hard time feeling good about working on something that directly replaces human labor without much benefit other than profit.
You picked an example where the Job includes social interaction, which is a fundamental human need. Let's consider an assembly line worker who fastens the same set of screws over and over again. Do you still come to the same conclusion? Is a dull, repetitive job psychologically harmful over long times?
There are jobs that greatly endanger people's physical health. Mining and construction come to my mind. If automation can make these jobs safer, go for it. For everything else, we will probably end up with a balance between heavy automation and niches where artisans hand craft similar products because they love doing so. It should ideally be a free choice instead if people getting preasured into low skill/low wage/high risk jobs because they need to eat.
I'm not sure that we do have the workforce. The generation of workers I remember from childhood had a large array of skills crucial in manufacturing that are now withering or have disappeared entirely.
The people that are maintaining those skills and learning the new skills needed are increasingly elsewhere.
Haven't heard that definition of canard in a while...
As with most things, I'm fairly sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle and it varies industry to industry. Yea, a lot of stuff went to china, but a lot of workers were also replaced by automated systems. In a lot of cases, I'd even venture to say maybe a majority, it was both. It's not even close to factually true to say it's JUST china or JUST robots.
Also, do you mind elaborating on how that's specifically anti-worker? Either case can be construed as such depending on your position.
It's not true that US or any other developed country have lost their manufacturing base. The rest of the economy has grown faster than manufacturing.
Developed countries have moved into high-tech, high productivity, more capital intensive manufacturing with complex supply chains. If you want to bring back low productivity products into your country, you must accept wage decline, slower growth and lowering quality of life.
You can prepare for emergencies using other means and using relatively small adjustments. Post-industrial societies have higher productivity than industrial societies. Turning the clock back is not a good idea.
It's hard to see how lower paid jobs are more liveable or provide better quality of life, or how smaller scale and therefore less efficient manufacturing would be better for the environment. I just don't see how these outcomes are supposed to arise.
More resilient, ok maybe, but surely there are other ways that resilience could be achieved through e.g. rolling stockpiling or maintaining flexible manufacturing capability. We don't necessarily need to be able to make our own masks all the time, but have the capacity to make them if needed. there are a range of new technologies coming along that could provide this flexibility, such as 3d printing and flexible robotic assembly systems. That would come at a cost for sure, but could provide the needed flexibility at a much lower social cost than pushing people back into lower value long term employment.
>It's hard to see how lower paid jobs are more liveable or provide better quality of life
We had higher paid jobs (or more yield per job, a single working person could support a family, buy a house, send kids to college) in the 50s and 60s for example, so I'm not sure why "turning back time" means lower paid jobs (or less purchase capacity).
Give me necessities (house/rent, food, taking care of kids, college, etc) and more freedom/livable work, and I can live without 90% of modern "must haves", from smartphones to same-day-delivery from poorly-paid adults in wharehouses working 10-hour shifts in diapers to send me Amazon Prime goods made in China...
> We had higher paid jobs (or more yield per job, a single working person could support a family, buy a house, send kids to college) in the 50s and 60s for example
So, your proposal is to bomb Europe and Asia's industrial base to increase America's relative competitiveness?
If we're talking apples to apples about the world economy of the 50s and 60s...
Ok, that’s fine. It’s your life. If you want to go and work in a factory, good for you.
I had a conversation like this with a friend of mine a few years ago. He was complaining about the lack of manufacturing jobs here in the UK and that we needed real jobs for real people. So I pointed at his 5 year old son playing nearby and said ok. What sort of factory would he like his son to work in when he grows up? What sort of education did he plan for him that would best suit him for factory life? Silence.
The US economic boom in the 50s largely stemmed from the fact that the entire outside world had been devastated from WW2. US industry had a huge lead since the continental US was largely free on war damage.
"quality of life" what's that, that's a question. Does buying new car every 3 years is a condition for a good life quality? New iPhone every 2 years? Pair of shoes/trousers or fashionable t-shirt every month? Maybe people will just discover that driving older car does not really deteriorate their life quality and new iPhone does not really matter, it just allows Apple to put more cash on the huge pile they already have. Maybe Tim Cook will not afford new jet or yacht next year, but, frankly, who cares?
300 to 800 factories yearly closed their doors in France since the introduction of the Euro. Italy faces a lesser but still steep industrial decline. In the meanwhile, industrial output boomed in the German hinterland of Eastern Europe.
Apart from the arguable “yearly”, that’s just efficiency in practice. When you look at the US, you see the same thing: there isn’t a large movie industry in each state, but there is one Hollywood (and one Broadway for theatre). Attracting all talent and capital from the entire continent allows for a level of economies of scale and quality refinement that makes it absolutely dominant worldwide. The same process happened for Silicon Valley / Bay Area, or even Detroit back in the day - it’s not like they were only making cars for Illinois and immediate surroundings...
I’m Italian and I can see our country becoming such a centre of attraction in certain fields (fashion and advertising in Milan, for example; food in Emilia; motor-racing in Romagna; tourism in Tuscany...). I’m not terribly worried that our widget-making capabilities have lowered - we are still paying the economic and social price of 60s-style industry in some areas (Taranto, Pozzuoli etc).
In the end it always boils down to this annoying tribalism - in a global world, thinking that French and Germans and Italians and Spanish must be separate and autonomous little tribes, is as silly as thinking that Nice or Lyon should be completely separate and autonomous from Paris and Calais.
That's efficiency from a certain perspective. That's this wonderful efficiency that makes the world extremely sensitive to the current Covid-19 situation. That's the very opposite of antifragility. We need resilience, too.
This has absolutely nothing to do with isolationism or tribalism. Gee, I hate this sort of strawman argument.
Our globalised, ultra-lean, efficient world was built on a humongous influx of fossil fuels and other limited resources that destroyed our climate while being so "efficient". Fossil fuels (and phosphates) that will become scarce at some point or another.
Efficiency and resiliency are different things. If you want resiliency, you plan accordingly - left to its own devices, the capitalist market will always go for ultimate efficiency, that's a primary property of the system. This is not the Soviet Union deciding to do potatoes in one country and cars in another, people take smaller decisions that aggregate up to certain phenomenons. If you don't like those phenomenons, you have to intervene pretty radically.
> This has absolutely nothing to do with isolationism or tribalism.
This has absolutely all to do with tribalism. If industries had closed in France and opened in Belgium, making them operatively indistinguishable from French industries for all intents and purposes (as distance is negligible and half of them basically speak the same language), people would still go on about lacking French industry. Why? Because Belgium is conceptually "not France". Nobody complains (anymore) about a single factory serving an entire country, why should we worry about a single factory serving half a continent? Do you seriously think you should have a widget-making factory in every city or town, for each different type of widget...? "OMG the world might end, we need to be able to make Gucci shoes in every town!"
> fossil fuels and other limited resources that destroyed our climate
I do not disagree, but that's something that effectively started 300 years ago and is not going to end anytime soon, unless you enjoy riding horses and going to bed with the sun. We will find alternatives (in some areas we already have, effectively; they are just not equally distributed yet).
Sorry but no, the problem isn't of industry closing down in France and opening back in Belgium, you're misrepresenting things. There has been a long history of the idea that we Europeans don't really need to "make things", that we could relocate our industry wherever it's more "efficient" (i. e. cheaper, because mostly of lower environmental and social safeguards, and because nobody directly pays for the externalities -- that's good old imperialism, colonialism in new clothes IMO) and keep the know-how, engineering, and power for us while Chinese or others would do the dirty work for us. And this stupid idea began to crumble a few years back already, and is now suddenly proven dead to everyone (hopefully).
There is such a thing as sovereignty, and it doesn't matter at which scale it happens; sovereignty implies having control on whatever things you can't do without. Can Europe or the US be sovereign without steel mills? maybe. Car manufacturing? possibly. Chemistry and pharmaceutical production? not so sure. Oil? see our leaders grovelling at MBS' knees while he's butchering Yemen. Ah.
In the US, some top brass came recently to the realisation that the US can't make a war plane without Chinese input anymore. That may be a problem sooner or later.
Similarly, the impact of the transfer of industries and money across Europe isn't a problem per se, it's only a problem because nothing provides any equilibrium -- no transfers at any significant scales. So far Germany sends cars and machines across Europe, and gets paper in exchange. At times, some important German minister or another goes harping that someday, that TARGET2 balance will have to be cleared. Does this even make sense? Can we have a European money, but not a European industry? I don't think so. Something will have to give at some point or another.
You're mixing together a bunch of different issues. On some of them we don't even disagree. But they are different issues. And the issue of "sovereignty" is precisely the tribalistic attitude I was talking about.
That's pretty obvious. Germany has superior industry, yet thanks to Euro they are able to keep prices reasonably low. If Mark was still used, it would have cost 2 USD and others could compete at least in prices. This hurt even more Italy. Next, Germany managed to build a cheap suppliers chain out of former East Block countries (especially Poland).
People like to say post industrial and post information societies but neither of those are true. We rely on both quite heavily and should learn from things like this pandemic that we can't trust to outsource all our manufacturing to other countries especially military rivals like China who will naturally cut us off when we have a war over Taiwan when China really starts flexing.
No country has the manufacturing base to meet the demand for these masks under a pandemic, not even China. That’s what the article is all about. Your thoughts on the merits of trade wars are not applicable.
Who defines what's applicable on HN? This article discusses Chinese supply chains and a manufacturing shortage for a specific need the result of which is decreased national security.
If there is another country (USA) which has relatively significantly diminished supply chains and manufacturing capacity and therefore has an even greater national security risk, why is that not applicable to be discussed? If, further, there is an opportunity and process by which that country (USA) could close that gap, why is it not applicable to be discussed?
Some countries have a sufficient manufacturing base that allows them to spin up mass manufacturing of (for example) masks over a month or two.
You don't need to keep spare capacity for everything, but you need to have local capacity (not necessarily spare) for building custom manufacturing machines and staffing them, so that you can divert it to manufacture arbitrary physical goods if needed. Some countries can do that, most don't - but some of these could and should build that capacity.
The US is having trouble making enough masks to meet its normal day-to-day demand for them, let alone the increase from a pandemic, because almost all the mask production has been outsourced to China and they're redirecting the entire output to local use. That's an issue and it's a reason why the US might want extremely substantial tariffs or even quotas on mask imports in normal circumstances.
No, it wasn't. 3M has been making their N95 respirators in the US the whole time. It was cheaper masks (e.g., dust masks, procedure masks) that had their production outsourced.
For N95 masks as the article points out, yes, no one has the melt-blown fabric manufacturing machines that are a precursor.
However, if everyone around you wears surgical masks, then everyone is blocking ingesting about about 80% of particulate matter [1]. For an emergency like the pandemic, we're also interested in the masks blocking what wearers breathe out to surgical standards, what the masks were designed for. That's a "not letting perfect be the enemy of good" level of "good enough" if your alternative is letting front line healthcare staff go without melt-blown fabric filtering PPE because everyone is scrambling for P95 or P100 masks.
The US military establishment after the pandemic is controlled will hopefully be given a hand in determining precursor tech tree bottlenecks like the OP article pointed out, and have Congressional authorization to perform economic disaster preparedness within its scope. Stockpile and maintain sufficient operational skills alongside key equipment, so our disaster preparedness is better than "duck and cover" (some interesting questions behind that door).
Some modeling suggests we need a minimum 3 month lockdown in the US to cut deaths in half [2], 18 months (or however long it takes for critical mass of population to develop immunity or vaccinated immunity) to approach a semblance of status ante quo death rate. I wish they would put their modeling source and data onto Github (or Wolfram Alpha?), so others can work with the model (I'm interested in its backtest results from previous epidemics). If we lockdown for even 3 months, then that's GFC effects; 18 months is Great(er) Depression.
Rome was a "superpower" militarily but it couldn't feed itself, and had to rely on grain from Egypt and the fertile crescent to feed its population.....
Here we can't produce some basic silly things... as it is not that economical during normal times...
Perhaps farming subsides are not a crazy type of idea after all.
Am I taking crazy pills? The US and Europe subsidize their agricultural industries heavily and have done so for decades. They're fully or largely capable of feeding themselves - and yes, precisely because these places decided that food is a significant factor for the stability of a country and a national security issue. Hell, people bitch and moan about how agriculture gets so many subisidies (corn in the US? anything in the EU), but frankly, to outsource food production to the rest of the world would seriously threaten the cohesiveness of our countries.
I dont think the comment you're replying to was saying the US isnincaphle of feeding itself, but trying to make a comparison to past empires which had outsourced parts of their economies to foreign powers
Farming subsidies for food systematically cause overproduction. This is problematic environmentally for land use and climate. It also accelerates soil depletion and salinification.
At the time Rome was a military superpower and it did not have the capacity to feed itself, the agriculture was at a completely different level. Farming subsidies have no logical link to Rome 2000 years ago.
"Superpower" in the American context is largely about our ability to project our military and economic power upon other societies, not about our ability to provide for the well-being of all Americans.
You could even (cynically) look at it the other way, that part of our "superpower" is the projection upon the world of the disaffection and anger that we breed internally by not providing for the well-being of all our citizens (in ways far more severe than a dearth of N95 masks). You see that phenomenon much more clearly in dictatorships and autocracies, but to an extent it's here too.
This is the conundrum. People want manufacturing here and also want it to be super high paying with skills learned in a few days. People also want to buy things at the dollar store. If all the things at the dollar store were made by US workers, there wouldn't be dollar stores. Dollar stores exploded after Clinton opened up trade with China. Want people really want is buying power even if they don't understand it. It is also why I personally feel we are better off with removing all wage taxes on the poor than trying to push minimum wage higher and higher. Rich people don't shop at Wal-Mart. If everyone there makes $20/hour, it just makes it more expensive for the same people who now make "more" money (and they'll pay more taxes). If costs rise just like wages, buying power doesn't increase and could actually go down even if someone "makes" more.
> It is also why I personally feel we are better off with removing all wage taxes on the poor than trying to push minimum wage higher and higher.
Confused, are you under the impression the entirety of everyone's wages is taxed in the United States?
P.S. On your larger point: I'm not sure in what world you think 0% tax is a substitute for minimum wage. It certainly does not prevent you from earning atrociously low wages (and having correspondingly abysmal purchasing power). It only means the government won't take any of your measly earnings. Whereas minimum wage is designed to solve exactly that problem.
To be fair, I never said get rid of minimum wage. I was talking about pushing it up to things like $20. The point I was trying to make is that if you go too high, you cause people to just up tax brackets and higher costs at the places they shop because those workers are also making $20/hour now too. Some people think tools like EITC helps the poor more than pushing minimum wage up and I tend to agree. I don't think EITC goes far enough and I would remove all federal taxes for people who earn less than some $X/year.
That still doesn't make any sense. Consider the federal case. Currently minimum wage is $7.25/hr or just above $15k/yr, whereas $20 minimum wage is like $40k/yr, or like $18.40 after federal tax (ignore FICA + states for now, they're beside my point).
You're complaining raising minimum wage to $20 is not the solution, but you want to raise it some, and make up for the rest with lowering taxes? So what mix are you imagining will give comparable results? Like say, raise minimum wage to, I dunno, maybe $10? In what world is lower taxes going to make up the $8.40 shortfall? Are your taxes going to be negative? Or are you suggesting you're comfortable raising minimum wage to $18.40 but the $20.00 is what you find overly excessive?
P.S. I wasn't even talking about EITC, but the standard deduction. Your first $18,650 of income as head of household are simply untaxed ($24,800 for couples)... period. That's exactly what you were proposing, and it's been already there, for a long time. In hourly terms that's $9/hr for heads of households ($12/hr for couples) of untaxed income. EITC is relatively obscure by comparison, so I'm confused why you would first think of that when replying... I'm guessing you might be confused about how standard deductions and tax brackets work? Or possibly unfamiliar with the US tax system?
You are so right, it's incredible how many people don't grasp this. Further, people in lower brackets think that the tax rate in higher brackets is unfair because it applies to the whole income (rather than just that bracket).
I guess a piecewise affine function is just too complicated...
This is correct and an answer I give to people on the coasts when they ask why the US govt pays farmers. It is imperative that a country can feed itself.
> e.g. "Five months worth of supplies were used by one hospital in six days" [1]
Here in Austria we don't even have enough N95 masks for hospital staff and medical personnel. This is completely irresponsible and not impossible to fix. It should be part of any pandemic plan to stockpile these. Things would work much better if at least this was covered now, but sadly it isn't and people will die because of it.
Stockpile how? This is typical niche product, nobody assumes this will be needed in huge quantities. There was a post on HN about how difficult is to produce those masks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22613061) and that setting up assembly line for needed materials takes 6 months (6 months in Germany, who are already producing this stuff).
I found: "Over time, components such as the straps and nose bridge material may degrade, which can affect the quality of the fit and seal" [1]
Also, some filters are constructed from charged fibers and electrostatic attraction helps in the filtering [2]. I wonder if that electrostatic attraction can be lost in some way, which would help explain the expiry date.
Anyway, [1] also says using expired masks may be considered in a crisis, best for training and fit testing though.
Like most non-organic things masks "expire" because the manufacture needs to not be liable after a certain date (after all, the manufacturer can't be realistically held responsible indefinitely) and the institutions buying the masks are unwilling to take on the responsibility of determining the quality of their own stockpile so they just trash them and buy more.
The military actively researches this kind of thing and knows exactly how long past it's expiration date many products are good for. I'm unaware of any other organizations that take on this responsibility.
Once you go down this analysis rabbit hole, I believe the rational conclusion is to "stockpile" manufacturing capacity by keeping manufacturing under physical domestic control.
Otherwise you're always fighting the last war. Today it is a respiratory-oriented weakness in our supply chain. Tomorrow it could be fungal spores; do we have enough domestic manufacturing capacity to create fungicides at pandemic scale?
Another mitigation option is standardized international cooperation and automated data interchange on international acute public health matters when an issue rises to just the regional level. Improving the level of integrated data sharing in this age of data mining would accelerate research and development of responses. I was hopeful that a standardized data representation format already existed, and highly-granular patient data from around the world would be available to the entire public (not just institutions) to sift through. Instead, we're still exchanging data through papers. The source code and raw data of models or clinical trial analyses are not published. We do have genome sequences available publicly, which helps, though.
Fair comment really. People are taking the worst case and running with it. Really governments should have had more forethought to make preparations while things were still good. Attempting self sufficiency sounds more like a post apocalyptic requirement, which given the circumstance is an easy trap to fall into. Though there's always the blindspot: not all futures are predictable. Just that this one mostly was.
> a country having its own major manufacturing base is not just an economic need but rather also a national security need
It's a strong argument for diverse suppliers, but unless you're a major international player, you don't really have the need, and having redundant manufacturing gets expensive. Just look at people balking at the cost of switching away from Huawei (that's a name I haven't heard for a few weeks).
> the trade war along with serious investment in expanding industrial capacity is likely net good.
But it makes war easier. You know who's not going to war? The US and China. If they did, they'd be economically screwed. Economic interdependence makes war a lot harder.
> Economic interdependence makes war a lot harder.
Citation needed. The American Revolutionary War, The American Civil War, WWI, WWII, just to name a few, all involved belligerents with significant economic interdependence.
My first thought about this economic mess was that it clearly illustrates why it'd be a bad idea to have another world war, even if it were mostly economic or infrastructure based.
I now think that this is getting us prepared to have a world war.
A much simpler option would to stop seeing the world as “them” and “us” and de-emphasize the borders in general.
It would be great if it were illegal to control the flows of inputs to and outputs from manufacturing, but I doubt national leaders hellbent on playing the blame game and prioritizing some lives/prosperity over others simply based on the accident of birthplace would ever give up that sort of control they now exercise.
The problem with the post-national view is that it has to be a consensus view globally. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma.
It has to begin with everyone respecting broadly the same general ethics and views on rights. As it turns out, there are countries where women aren't allowed to drive, where religious autocracies rule, where whole populations of religious minorities are imprisoned and enslaved and the people of those countries support it happily. Do you want people with those values having a say in how you live? I don't.
The problem is that values are not evenly distributed within a country. A nation is not a useful or even approximate proxy for values.
Most countries have a pretty big chunk of people in them that would be fine with a religious autocracy that enslaves those who don’t conform to the majority, the US included. It’s the same in every country.
There are, for example, a whole bunch of people in the US who are fine with some fiercely racist and inhumane federal policies, such as running concentration camps wherein many children are raped and otherwise sexually abused.
Do you want people with those values having a say in how you live? I don't.
> A nation is not a useful or even approximate proxy for values.
I bet you anything that if you polled Saudi Arabians and asked "Would you be willing to be ruled by a monarch?" and then do the same for Americans, you'll get wildly different results. If you are willing to make the bet large enough, I will go to relevant polling organizations to pay for one to be conducted.
> I bet you anything that if you polled Saudi Arabians and asked "Would you be willing to be ruled by a monarch?" and then do the same for Americans, you'll get wildly different results.
To my point, you'd get the same results in both places: some people in each country would say yes, and some other people in each country would say no.
Assuming one's ideology based on their geography is entirely outmoded in the age of global information systems.
If your point is "a variety of opinion can exist everywhere" then sure but that's not great evidence that nations aren't an "approximate proxy for values". If it's 90-10 in one country and 10-90 in another it's clearly a proxy and not a great argument.
>A nation is not a useful or even approximate proxy for values.
What? Of course it is. Even if you went one level down, states in the United States itself are excellent proxies for the mean values that are held in a particular region. If your point is that every geographic region has groups of people on the fringe, then yeah fine. That's true. But that doesn't mean anything with regard to the usefulness of what makes up a nation or its borders - which are of course proving quite useful during a pandemic.
> states in the United States itself are excellent proxies for the mean values that are held in a particular region.
I don't think those are any more practically useful, correlated, or appropriate than the assemblage, unless you go down to states where the population numbers are so low as to be less than a really meaningful statistical universe.
Populous states such as California and New York do not have anything remotely resembling universal buy-in on important values. Even within places like San Francisco, a single city/metro, you have a wide array of mutually exclusive value positions.
As soon as you get people together in large groups, you are going to have a large diversity in values and priorities. These civil perimeters have very little utility; I think people just like mentally personifying groups/nations so that they seem easier to reason about, regardless of the fact that it's wickedly inaccurate and not actually useful for that purpose at all. This is reflected in the widespread practice of synecdoche/metonymy.
China is a perfect example of this, as is California.
(TBH, I think it's a leftover from serfdom, where the lords/regional owners literally held physical dominion over the persons, labor, and travel rights of the people who lived within their borders. The Pythons' sketch on the matter from MPATHG accurately sums up my opinions on even thoroughly modern political assemblages.)
Personally, I reject the validity of all group identities that are based on sets containing more than a million or so humans. They're just not useful for reasoning about the group constituents, at all.
> But that doesn't mean anything with regard to the usefulness of what makes up a nation or its borders - which are of course proving quite useful during a pandemic.
Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
I think your parent wants to say that the mean is not a particularly useful measure in the space of values because there are many fairly distinct clusters. People close to the mean might be a tiny minority.
> The problem with the post-national view is that it has to be a consensus view globally. It's a classic prisoner's dilemma.
We can and are doing this at a much smaller scale. We have trade organizations that mediates disputes. And the US has been successfully pushing variants of the DMCA everywhere.
A sovereign country could decide that copyright is no more (within its borders), but no developed country has done it.
Most countries probably pay more in copyright royalties to other countries than they get in return.
Except there are situations such as this one where it doesn't matter how cooperative countries are. Even China was unable to produce enough medical supplies for their own needs, much less for the entire world. The US and Europe absolutely need to rebuild their industrial capacity to be able to cover their own needs in crisis situations. Anything else is just insanity.
I think your comment illustrates just precisely what a huge amount of effort and time it's going to take to get people to reorient their thinking along these lines.
"China" doesn't produce anything; human beings standing on the landmass called China produce medical supplies, just as human beings on other landmasses produce medical supplies. Recipients of medical supplies need more than can be supplied by Earth's manufacturers right now, as well as supply/demand scoped within specific regions or countries. That has nothing to do with countries or regions, any more than it has anything to do with which US state or city a factory is in.
I do agree that we should avoid excessive centralization of the manufacture of certain essential items, medications and medical supplies (and advanced/low power CPUs, and passenger aircraft) among them, but not for nationalistic reasons—simply because the Earth is big, transport is wasteful and resource-intensive (even if economically cheap), and resources are sometimes scarce/precious, such as in emergencies or supply interruptions (e.g. melt-blown fabric producing machines are time-consuming to produce).
It's nothing to do with the nationality of the people who produce the supplies, or the nationality of the people who need the supplies.
Perhaps the UN or another international body could coordinate ensuring that a certain amount of manufacturing capacity for various and specifically enumerated essential things could be carefully maintained on each continent, to guard against planet-scale civilizational collapse in rare events. I think in the old model this would be termed something like a "national security stockpile" or "strategic reserve" but ultimately it's more of a "civilization continuity capacity". Essential medicines and equipment are essential medicines and equipment, regardless of which humans need them, or where.
You saw what happened in the EU. No borders but also no shared decision-making and responsibility. It quickly deteriorated to a situation worse than in the US, with each country doing its own thing (including closing most borders), and very little cooperation and helping each other.
Trump might not be making the best decisions, but at least he's making decisions for the US! Noone is even trying to make decisions for Europe...
Well healthcare isn't organized on an European level but on a country level, so that's why the policy is directed on a country level but that doesn't mean there isn't any communication between countries. It's just that you mainly care about the countries you have a lot of (border)traffic with and not really about countries on the other side of the EU. I just watched the technical briefing to the Dutch parliament and the head of the RIVM (Dutch CDC equivalent) said that they are in close contact with for example the Italian hospitals to see what works and what doesn't.
I would like the EU to take more control over manufacturing protection gear and ventilators, and distribute them as needed over the EU.
EU isn't a federal government. It has very little practical ability to boss member countries around, and this is by design/democratic will of the member states (insofar you believe that this many levels of indirection still add up to a democracy).
If we wanted to turn EU into a federation, we would've done it. As it is now, member states cling to their sovereignty (IMO quite unfortunately).
> Noone is even trying to make decisions for Europe...
Of course people are. The EU commission works on it, countries talk to each other. Is there a fully coordinated EU response yet? No. Is there cooperation? Yes.
Well our female president Von Der Leyen snatched up a 80mill grant for cureVac in order to avoid Trump luring them to move and secure the covid-19 vaccine for US only.
One such “conflicting report” is CureVac themselves[0]:
> To make it clear again on coronavirus: CureVac has not received from the US government or related entities an offer before, during and since the Task Force meeting in the White House on March 2. CureVac rejects all allegations from press.
Oh sure, the original articles have been updated, but still the myth remains. Funny how that works.
Yes, that is what I was hinting at. Of course they could lie in the interest of a possible business relationship, but I see no evidence of this. I wonder how the rumor started.
The majority owner of the company said it is the case and the German government said they are discussing counter measures. This tweet is damage control and tries to use a bit of weasel wording to make it look better: There never was a formal offer, so we can just ignore informal talks, right?
Maybe. Perhaps it is a PR-move to bring the company into the spotlight. Perhaps it was Trump wanting to be seen as capable. Perhaps we will never know.
Indeed, every new crisis shows just how fragile the EU is. It's great that Europeans can travel from country to country, live and work in whichever member state they want, and can use the same currency, but the second there's a serious crisis, it's every member state for itself.
Yes and no. The economic benefits of globalized supply chains are real. The question is not whether or not supply chains should be globalized but how to ensure their safety in the event of a global disruption?
It's days like these that I'm really sad that more Americans don't do military service. Ensuring the long-term viability of large, generally dormant stockpiles is the core competency of the military in peacetime, because the military needs to spin up large numbers of resources on a dime when necessary and can't take several months or years to do so in the face of an imminent attack.
My argument is that the military should maintain large manufacturing capacity that is generally dormant during peacetime (when it is too expensive compared to a globalized supply chain) so that it can be spun up in the event of global supply chain disruptions.
In a day and age where security needs have more to do with economics than geopolitical control, it should arguably be the military's highest priority.
> My argument is that the military should maintain large manufacturing capacity that is generally dormant during peacetime (when it is too expensive compared to a globalized supply chain) so that it can be spun up in the event of global supply chain disruptions.
Might be a good solution, but how about having some more generic production capacity instead that can adapt quickly to urgent needs? China is quickly converting whole factories, with some research perhaps this process can be simplified and improved with more expensive, but flexible production technology. 3D printing instead of die casting etc. ...
It used to be the case in some countries; for example in my country the tobacco processing plants had the dual-purpose to build rifle ammo as most of the packing equipment used ~ 7.62 diameter. My cousin that worked in such a plant said it took less than 2 weeks for a full conversion. In this particular example there was no dormant capacity during peacetime, it was actively used on alternative production.
Much like the generic scientist/engineer in video games (imagine telling a chemical engineer that they're suddenly a electrical engineer), there is no such thing as "generic production capacity". Specific high-tech industries require specific hardware and specific expertise (like the melt-blown fabric mentioned in the article) that you can't just keep on standby indefinitely.
> Specific high-tech industries require specific hardware and specific expertise (like the melt-blown fabric mentioned in the article) that you can't just keep on standby indefinitely.
This depends on the product design and one has to be flexible. Do you think it's impossible to build N100 filter cartridges without melt-blown fabric?
The US did this during WWII, I don't see why it can't be done again.
They also took some more complex designs which required skilled labor and hand working (the 40mm Bofors comes to mind as an example) and modified the design significantly so it could be easily mass produced. This was in the days before CAD when everything was done on paper too
The argument for trade wars is that it encourages more local manufacturing and independence. That doesn't seem to be what's happened so far in the current dispute between China and the US though.
I suspect this is because the trade dispute has introduced so much uncertainty that nobody is willing to make long term investments in infrastructure and capacity, based on what may well be a temporary and constantly changing situation.
Does one of the n95 cotton candy machines even exist in the US?
I would love to see the specs for them made free and open so anyone could attempt to produce one and then have it vetted.
Contributing to e.g. firmware code for the thing is like the only meaningful thing I could put my skills towards in this epidemic. It would be an honor to do so.
The problem is not the specs and firmware code with these machines, it is the precision and tuning it to get good quality output. In the physical world, working with sub-micron polymer products is not something you solve with software. They wrote in the article about some challenges, none is trivial and none is due to hiding the specs or writing bad code.
The latency is due to those physical constraints, as you say and as discussed in the article. But that doesn't mean that IP constraints hinder the embarrassingly parallel scale out of multiple new machines put together by different people in different places.
Now, having 100 new machines ready in 5 months might be little better than 3 new ones in 5 months.
I don't mean to be one of those assholes that presumes software subsumes all problems, but my experience working with engineers is that they confuse a non-software hard part with a non-software critical path: even though software is the easy part, there are still gains to be had from making the easy part easier.
The article mentions this Florida company as one of the suppliers of such machines. They have a reasonably informative website.
http://www.hillsinc.net
> I do believe these masks are also made in the US, but this situation highlights exactly why a country having its own major manufacturing base is not just an economic need but rather also a national security need.
I might take your argument for the security need. But how does this highlight anything about an economic need? (Or am I misreading that?)
> In economic terms, under certain definitions and assumptions that are typical under modern economics, a trade war such as the current US-China trade war result in welfare losses. I believe, however, that when national security is taken into account (ie having the ability for the country to rapidly respond to productive capacity needs in a time of crisis), the trade war along with serious investment in expanding industrial capacity is likely net good.
Perhaps an optimally waged trade war might be? Not sure. But in practice, politicians use these highly theoretical arguments that might apply in very special cases to defend very crude behaviour.
Eg if you want to justify a trade war on national security grounds, your goal would presumably to weaken the other party?
One of the demands in Trump's trade war was that China open its markets more to American goods and services, and lower tariffs and restrictions on foreign commerce in general. That would only strengthen the Chinese economy, for all the orthodox reasons.
When you say that the US needs to "invest in itself", what you really mean is that the US needs to divert investments from industries in which it has a comparative advantage into industries that developing countries have a comparative advantage in.
The "comparative advantage" we enjoy is an artificial creation of deliberate policy choices. The traditional "well this is just econ 101" macroeconomic lectures describe scenarios as they exist, not how they should be. The "comparative advantage" that you think developing countries have is using cheap slave wage labor to produce an unending wave of cheap (mostly plastic) consumer goods that people are quickly realizing in this pandemic they don't really need. Not to mention non-existent environmental regulations.
I hope that this crisis makes people do a deep introspection of their consumption habits, and realize where these "goods" actually come from, and whether it was really worth it to stock our giga stores with this stuff.
You can die in a pandemic still singing the song about the "comparative advantage". Not to mention that there is no comparative advantage when you ignore the buzzwords and actually do the comparison seriously.
If investment were somehow zero sum, yes that's a large part of what I would mean. Luckily, for my point to continue standing without being reduced to that, investment is indeed not zero-sum.
Yes, but who would pay these companies just to stay in business? If China can produce these things for half the price (even after shipping), people will buy from them instead. That's how the free market works.
I mean you could mandate that certain essential products can only be made locally / cannot be imported from abroad, but who is going to pay for it? That would require a political revolution, and despite everything that's happened over the past years, that just isn't going to happen in the US just yet.
Besides, it'd make the US more communist, where the government controls the market and production and where people work.
"Currently, of the 200 million masks China makes a day, only 600,000 are N95 standard masks, used by medical personnel, according to the National Development and Reform Commission, a state planning body. "
There is quite is quite a bit of information readily available about sterilizing disposable N95 masks with UV-C light. While not nearly as good as a fresh mask, this might be a preferable alternative to reusing the same mask unsterilized.
The UV light needs to have a wavelength around 260nm (shorter wavelength than standard UV light). Such UVC lamps are cheap and readily available, commonly used in consumer products for aquarium water sterilization and air purification. Example replacement bulb: GermGuardian LB4000 GENUINE UV-C Replacement Bulb for AC4300BPTCA, AC4825, AC4850PT & AC4900CA Germ Guardian Air Purifiers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055522F6/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_4D...
I believe that microwaving a used mask could also be an effective way to sterilize the mask. (0)
I found this information by following links from the CDC website a few weeks ago when I was exploring the possibility of buying masks for my family and found that they were already being hawked online at ridiculous prices.
Perhaps steam and/or use of a pressure cooker could also be effective. Many people who do home canning of food goods have a pressure cooker and are already familiar with usage and cleaning.
The article posted suggests that this could be a viable method of home decontamination of used masks if I read it right. I also found an article that touched on use of a steamer to accomplish similar results. I can't find that article right now but if I do I will post it for review. Microwaving alone, without adding water to generate the steam should kill most water-based organisms. The article I read stated that microwave times from 30 seconds to 5 minutes were used. I need to find that article...
What does everyone else think? I'd be interested in hearing.
This[0] article goes over recommendations for extended use, reuse, and risks. It also has a healthy list of references, some of which are by Fisher et al., the author of the paper you linked.
Most masks have a metal tab bending over the bridge of the nose, as well as metal staples for the elastic bands, which would prevent you from microwaving. Cartridge type filters would work though.
I had considered the metal parts of the mask to be a potential problem. In the worst case scenario it should be relatively simple for mask owners to remove the metal tab from the nose and the staples holding the elastic bands before microwaving.
Once they are done in the microwave the bands could be stapled in place with your ordinary stapler and the band reattached with hot glue. Those who have a needle and thread could also stitch a sleeve onto the nose piece that is open at one end and just reinsert the metal nose piece once it is out of the microwave. The thin metal should withstand several bend cycles before needing to be replaced and it can be replaced with any thin aluminum strip which one could obtain from lots of places around the house or at the hardware store.
The bands and straps could be washed in ordinary soap to sterilize them before reuse.
Just thinking outside the box here. What do you think?
I read about this option. The potential problem that I see is that coating the mask with salt or another substance, especially if part of a DIY project, is likely to leave you with a mask that is unusable since you have no way to control salt crystal size, nucleation points, etc.
The crystals will inevitably grow on the treated surface and block the filter media so that you start with an N95 rated mask and end up with an N99 or higher rated mask that can only be used for a few minutes before it leaves the user gasping for breath. Preserving the filter ability should be the goal in the sterilization process. I don't see a way to accomplish that without specialized equipment that allows the user to limit crystal size and nucleation sites.
That is why microwaving or UV sterilization seem the most viable to me. UV sterilizers require the user to follow specific guidelines to avoid health negative consequences and it seems unlikely that everyone could or would take steps to protect themselves from the UV damage.
Microwaves are nearly ubiquitous, though I personally don't own one and haven't since I had my wife get rid of ours once our son was done with bottle feeding. People know how to follow directions for using microwaves. It just seems easier to me to accomplish the objective with something that is a common or easily obtained household item that people are already familiar with.
I read the same thing. Glad to see others investigating their options.
I'm not sure a DIYer could accomplish this without compromising the filter media unless there were kits available or a crystal clear guide for the task.
I realize that you can just wash the mask to remove the salt and surfactant and in the process any pathogens will be killed by the salt and soap. However, if you have to wait on this to dry between uses since the washing will fill some percentage of the pore spaces with water then you haven't accomplished as much as you could have if you had simply microwaved the mask in a boil-in bag allowing the steam to do the same work. As a bonus, people already know how to use microwaves and most have them at home.
I'm not trying to say that salt and surfactant doesn't work, only to say that this is better accomplished in a controlled environment with equipment that can insure that crystal size is controlled and filter media is relatively unaffected.
I agree that the mask could be contaminated. In fact, I would hope that the person wearing the mask has a good reason to wear it, either someone in their household is sick and they are protecting themselves or they are sick and they are protecting everyone else who is home with them. I think it is a bad idea for everyone to wear a mask when there is no threat to their health. With people furloughed home it is likely that many of us can avoid contact with an infected person and therefore we don't need masks.
But if the user has paid close enough attention these last few weeks, then they are probably already washing hands anyway so as long as they wash up after putting the mask in the microwave and before they touch their face they should be good.
If the mask is punctured that creates a much larger path for droplets to get behind the mask or if the user is the infected one, to get past the mask into the clean air on the other side. To mitigate that situation, there is no reason that I can see where coating the puncture with elmer's glue, hot glue, etc doesn't solve that issue.
Bending the mask will probably create permeability that could allow larger particles to pass anyway. The plastic filaments they talk about are not likely to hold up to much flexing and it is a decrease in the tortuosity of the path through the media that creates the risk. Therefore, breakage along clearly defined planes creates an easy path through the media even if the mask is perfectly fitted to spec. I think bending the mask is the easiest way to send it out of spec so like you say, manipulating the mask creates a situation where it may no longer be effective against the particles sizes that it should protect against.
While I suppose it’s an interesting academic discussion, frankly the idea of being able to safely contain an aerosolized upper respiratory disease at home is ludicrous to begin with, so it doesn’t really matter.
The simple truth of the matter is that if you are in a home or apartment with an infected person, and you remain present during their period of high viral shedding, you’re practically certain to contract it as well. You don’t have a negative pressure containment room, your home furnace is going to drag it all over the house. Normal airflow as you open the door will probably drag it out.
It’s perfectly valid to stay and care for grandpa, just don’t have any illusions that you’re not going to get it as well. You 100% will. Doctors who are trained in cleanliness and with access to real, non-makeshift gear are getting it.
That’s fine if you’re not a senior yourself. Severe reactions are fairly rare for anyone under 60 or so. And it can’t really be helped without abandoning grandpa.
I am going to use recent personal experience to disagree with your conclusion that uninfected people in a house with someone who is infected cannot protect themselves and will end up sick.
This past December, in the week before Christmas, my wife had surgery that required an overnight stay. She was released with instructions to avoid laughing, coughing, no physical activity, etc. for several weeks. A couple days after she was home our son came down with an infection that turned into a deep, dry, raspy cough with sudden fever over 102*F. Since she needed to avoid any sort of infection and he was getting worse by the hour I took him to ER where he had a test for flu since people at his school had been down with it in the weeks prior.
The ER doctor told us it was a viral infection but the flu test was negative meaning that we either got there before there was enough viral material for a positive test or that it was something else causing it besides flu.
It became my job to keep his infection from spreading to my wife. To manage that I used sanitation instructions from my sister, a nurse, and I kept him isolated in his bedroom and my wife in our bedroom. I prepared all meals, etc. and cleaned the house, etc. I slept in a spare bedroom in case I was infected. I bought some cheap face masks, not hospital grade, just over-the-ear masks and made sure that she wore one every time she left her room and he wore one every time he left his room. I also wore one every time he left his room. Once he returned to his room I went along behind him and wiped every knob, switch, flat surface, etc that he could've contacted and put his used glasses and utensils in the dishwasher. Then I washed my own hands.
My son's fever broke after 4 days on Motrin and his cough went away too.
My wife never got sick and neither did I. We were all in the same house sharing the same air on days when the heater ran regularly due to a strong cold front.
No one wore a mask all the time. We wore them only when we had the opportunity to have contact with each other.
When the stories started breaking in China about this, I started following it all here on HN. I understood the challenges they would face having just faced similar challenges myself.
I found myself with part of a container of lysol wipes, a few cheap face masks that hadn't been used, some hand sanitizer for each bedroom, and the knowledge that one could beat something like this if they were diligent.
I realize that this is just my story but it is all true. Isolating the infected person, using PPE, sanitizing everything diligently can prevent everyone in the house from being infected if someone in your family does come down with an airborne infection.
My house is cluttered and disinfecting was potentially a chore but I made it easier by following each person along and watching carefully everything that they did while they were out "in public". Once they were isolated, I retraced their steps wiping everything down. I hope you don't have to share my experience but you can rest easier knowing that there is hope.
All of the things you've said about mask functionality, reusability and sterilization are very interesting. As is your experience with in-home caregiving.
Is there a quick, effective and easy sanitizing protocol for N95 masks that you think would work for hospitals that are short on masks?
One of the first articles that I read mentioned the use of autoclaves, essentially steamers used for sterilizing surgical tools, etc. I think it was a NIOSH article. These are already in use in hospitals.
That led me to the article I linked about using microwaves. Microwave ovens excite water molecules to cook and the creation of steam from the cooking process should kill the pathogens.
I have family members who need some protection from this threat and that is why I went down this rabbit hole in the first place.
Based on everything I read I am comfortable concluding that masks can be reused if they are sanitized by microwaving with a small amount of water to create steam.
The methods tested in the paper appear to show effectiveness that maintains N95 rating and kills pathogens in the process.
I am not a doctor and in fact I spend too much of my time trying to avoid ever seeing one.
Perhaps you or someone else out there can recreate these tests or conduct similar tests to determine whether this is viable.
An autoclave is more like a pressure cooker than a steamer.
You need temperatures well in excess of 100 degrees Celsius to reliably kill everything, especially bacterial spores (which, admittedly, are not the major issue here).
To do so, autoclave use high pressure steam (121C at 15 psi) for long enough that everything reaches that temperature. A microwave won’t even get close to that, though it can disinfect, rather the sterilize, just like boiling water can. You also need to be careful that the entire object gets heat-treated; home microwaves often have hot and cold spots and one missed spot can spoil everything.
This stuff is fairly complicated and I’d encourage you stick with established methods if you can, which I think is currently treatment with a UVC lamp.
Thanks for the information. I agree that home microwaves heat unevenly but I think that is one of the reasons that the authors in the article went with bagging the masks. The steam would be trapped in the bags and the masks would get treatment at a more consistent temperature making the process more effective at killing the pathogens.
I think that microwaving the masks accomplishes the task using tools that an ordinary person may already have on hand and tools which require almost no training. UV sterilization is complicated by the need to avoid exposure to UV light and the fact that most people don't have a suitable UV lamp available. Hospitals may already have those tools on hand and in that case they probably have trained users who can disinfect masks with them. That seems to be the best way for them to reuse masks.
Agreed. The use case I am hoping to help solve for is health care workers (eg. Nursing home aides) who have a very limited supply of N95 masks that they wind up having to re-use for multiple days / weeks at a stretch. If they have access to a quick affective way to sterilize them without ruining them (I like the microwave idea too) then they can stay healthier, and their patients can stay healthier.
A filter mask becomes more efficient as time passes due to blockage of infiltration/exfiltration paths. In this fashion, an N95 mask degrades to an N99 level mask and it becomes more difficult for the user to get enough air across the filter media to support life so they end up needing a new mask that has less restriction.
As the user wears the mask, most of the blockage and increase in filtering efficiency will occur on the face side of the mask and will be a result of condensation of droplets from the user's respiration. The filter media will become blocked from the inside out. There will be little if any measurable restriction added by the pathogen load of the unfiltered air on the outside of the mask. The distribution of pathogens in the air or the dust load would need to be pretty high for the outside of the mask to ever cause the mask to be restricted.
The main problem with the outside of the mask will be one of accumulation of pathogens on the outside.
I believe that this is the case for use of a mask by an uninfected person.
If the mask user is infected then the mask still becomes blocked on the face side of the mask, increasing its filtering efficiency, but that side also contains the pathogen load that that mask needs to prevent escaping into the room air.
Since the blockage in any case will be mainly from condensation and not from any biological load or dust load then it should be a simple matter to sterilize the masks in a microwave with a small amount of water to create steam. It may even be that the breath condensed on the mask will be sufficient.
I doubt in any case that a pathogen can pass through a mask and I will tell you why.
The path of infection for most people wearing a mask is mostly likely to be infection due to an ill-fitted mask that allows air movement with no filtering such as through hair, or in small spots where a good seal is not possible.
Now the why - filter media must have porosity and permeability. It is designed to create a tortuous path through the media so that anything moving in the connected air spaces has a high probably of being trapped in a void. If there are lots of twists and turns the resistance to flow increases (geologists call it the formation factor - a measure of the tortuosity of the path through the media) and turbulence causes an increase in the likelihood that a particle will contact the inside of the pore path and become trapped. Think of it like water in a river. As the river winds across the landscape, there are points in the stream where flow is weaker and the particle load settles out to form sandbars. There are also points in the stream where the current is faster and larger particles can pass.
The path through filter media is the same. When something encounters an area of low air velocity it becomes stuck. When turbulence increases it becomes more likely to collide with the sides and become stuck. Most of the pathogen load will likely be found very close to the source side. I don't expect much to be able to penetrate to the center of the mask.
That is also why condensation ends up rendering the mask useless. Water droplets coalesce and eventually you have blocked too many of the potential paths through the filter media.
Anyway, this got long winded. Sorry.
I hope some of this makes sense and if anyone has anything to add or discuss hit me up.
I thought about this a lot last night trying to get to sleep.
Using what we know about the lifetime of the virus on various surfaces can we exploit that to allow reuse of masks that have been exposed to the virus but that still retain their filtering ability because they were only used for the time period necessary to treat one patient and then were discarded so as not to carry the virus into clean areas?
I wonder whether masks that have been used once could be bagged and set aside long enough for the virus to die after which time they could be reused. One could speed the process by placing the masks in a humidity controlled environment so that air circulates around them allowing any water film from the user's breath to quickly evaporate. Obviously it would be critical to avoid any situation where you created an opportunity for mold growth.
In this model, the masks are collected as they are discarded. Then they are held out of service for at least double the known time necessary for them to die on the mask surface. This requires someone to determine how long it is viable on a mask. That seems easy enough to determine.
This may be an option for places where ordinary disinfection is problematic. Sounds extreme and potentially dangerous and that is why it should be thoroughly vetted before anyone attempts it. Don't try this at home!
I also wondered about how health care workers are being infected and after seeing a number of posts with pictures of workers showing their faces marked by the masks I have a question.
Is it possible that the health care workers are infecting themselves by creating an environment on their skin that is conducive to infection? There are pictures showing deep marks that to me suggest that the masks have been made to fit around noses but in the process, the fit across the rest of the face is compromised.
The model for this comes from my own experience repairing cars, plumbing, etc. in any situation where a gasket is used to create a seal.
The user needs to avoid over-torquing the connections being joined because that over-torquing deforms the gasket enough to compromise the seal thus creating a leak.
I know that the average mask does not fit many people's faces. It seems that a more effective seal can be accomplished if one had a gasket kit with the mask that would effect a seal without the need to tightly compress across the nose. The gasket could be applied directly to the edge of the mask and would adhere to the mask using a peel-n-stick gasket.
I know from using masks in my own shop that leakage around the nose is the biggest problem with masks. The second biggest in my experience is leakage on the cheeks due to facial hair since I have a mustache that grows wild on my own lip and I am unlikely to trim or shave it.
If health workers don't clean their faces when they put on a new mask they may be allowing virus to infect them in the damaged skin areas.
Thinking out loud here. It just seems stupid to throw away an effective filter that has been used once for a few minutes when it has been demonstrated that virus has a finite lifespan that we can nail down by testing. If we simply wait for time to do its job, the masks can be reused multiple times with no opportunity for chemical or mechanical degradation of the filter media.
Probably a monumentally stupid idea like all those ideas you get just before you slip into unconsciousness.
tl:dr - For those workers with no sterilization options can they just set the used masks aside out of service long enough for the virus to die before returning them to service?
Obviously this a question for someone with the facilities available to determine viability on mask media so no one should consider this to be an option at this time.
> Perhaps steam and/or use of a pressure cooker could also be effective. Many people who do home canning of food goods have a pressure cooker and are already familiar with usage and cleaning.
A pressure cooker is overkill. It's used in canning because you need to kill fungal/bacterial spores that can be very hardy pre-germination.
Viruses are amongst the easiest to "kill", and live bacteria somewhere in the middle.
I wonder how effective full sunlight is for masks and viruses. Say, 6 hours on each side.
I know about the pressure canner for spores. We can a lot of things here around the house and insuring that we have sterilized everything up front to prevent any opportunity for botulism or other pathogen to ruin the food is at the top of the list. I didn't realize that viruses could be easier to kill though. I appreciate that nugget.
Full sunlight, being UV-rich should be effective though like you I don't know how long one should plan to expose each side. I'd be interested in anyone's thoughts there.
The article that I linked specifically investigated the use of steamer bags in a microwave for purposes of sterilization. They showed it to be a viable method if I read it correctly.
We actually bought 2 UVC light bulbs just to sterilize my masks. We only have a handful, and believed early on that UVC could make them reusable, but have no proof.
But using them is very hard. They produce ozone which is harmful to your lungs, and the light themselves are harmful to your eyes and skin. So I don't have a safe way to set this up yet. Now that we are all quarantined maybe we can have more time to figure out a sustainable way to use it.
@jennyyang did you make your UVC setup yet? Here is what I wound up with over the weekend https://twitter.com/choser/status/1241933729536200709?s=21
I also found the system a bit hazardous and am treating it with more respect now. It seems pretty powerful even at 13W. I was sterilizing my masks for 2 hours, now am just doing one minute per side.
I put mine on my back entrance which is basically open air. Close door with cord under it. Able to plug it in without being able to see it and ozone spews out to pollute my city even more..
Do you know how long of an exposure is needed to be effective? assuming within 2-3 feet but single source not even light
Browsing Amazon, it seems that there are some UVC bulbs that specifically avoid ozone creation. Other variants are marked “with ozone”, and for some reason both variants typically cost the same. I bought one “no ozone” and plan to put it in inside a reflective “pouch” (actually just a silver lined grocery carrier) for sterilizing things without exposing anything outside the bag to the UVC light.
the thing is these masks were not designed to be re-used in a mechanical sense. they eventually just fall apart. they were meant to be thrown out after being used.
still, one of them can last a few days in a pinch.
There is a commercial product called Phone Soap (sold out now) that uses UV light to sterilize phones, keys, etc. you put the item inside it and I believe the UV light shines on it for 10 minutes which according to the manufacturer sterilizes it.
That’s 3 N95 masks for 200,000 people every day. China meanwhile has over 3 million doctors. So, production clearly needs to ramp up, but it’s not so far off the mark they can’t get there in a few months.
I disagree with the idea that no one will will an N95 mask after this threat ends. I personally use N95 masks in my shop all the time. I have a collection of masks for various filtration tasks including dust, welding gases, paint and organic vapors, and even an asbestos rated dust mask. Some of them are disposable N95 or N99 masks while others are half-face canister cartidge masks.
There will always be a market for masks and I think the price will go back down to normal levels - under $30 for 20 disposable masks.
Plus you have to consider that medical workers who use different N95 masks than I need, will always need protection from airborne threats. That won't change at all. The only change will be the threat itself.
People that hoarded these masks to gouge others should be held to account for that. I considered buying masks for my family but once I decided it might be a good idea, they were in short supply and the gougers had taken over the market. I currently have a few masks in my shop but almost all of them are used. I just bag them in a ziploc between uses so they don't absorb any fumes or get dusty or in the worst case, get pissed on by the rats that I'm trying to keep out of my shop.
I don't think all nurses and doctors are using N95 quality masks. At least from the videos I saw, many of them don't, and simply wearing surgical facemasks.
By now they probably have already exhausted/repurposed all the second hand manufacturing machines so they need new ones to add additional capacity. According to the article, the company building them needs months for a new one due to the precision requirements.
Even assuming it takes 5-6 months, I assume they did not start building new machines today. Starting late January puts the ramp up starting in ~3-4 months.
Only 600,000 of those are N95 standard, suitable for health care and using the special fabric in short supply.
Mask wear in Asia is common, for smog, smoke and controlling flu. The cheap ones don't last long, and often replaced instead of put through the wash. Common mask usage requires use of cheaper, more comfortable masks rather than the health care certified ones.
I would wear an N95 mask sometimes in Asia, to mitigate the pollution. I didn't throw it away after each use. I imagine their use by medical professionals to be a much different case though.
I think a lot of Asian people wore the cheap cloth ones. I have learned recently that these sometimes have replaceable inserts inside them.
> The masks filter pollution about as effectively after prolonged use as when they're new.
Filters generally get better at filtering as they get dirty. A pore with a mountain of dirt/dust over it gets even better at only permitting gasses through. But that also means less and less flow, until you're letting nothing through at all.
I think the other problem for medical use is moisture buildup. A damp/wet/sweaty N95 doesn't let gasses through very well.
Where I was in Asia it was one of the reasons, because you don't want to suffer the glares of people if they catch you sneezing without a mask. But people also wear them to protect themselves, from flu on the trains and smog when on the streets. And the other reason is for a bit of privacy, which appeals to young women in particular.
It's been shown by a few documentaries (by ARTE european channel) that up to at least the 3rd of march and in Beijing, you are not authorized to go out without a face mask (for grocery shopping for instance). Each family has a few "permits" available to go out but facemask (chirurgical type) is not an option for those going.
Your temperature as well as your mask compliance will be checked pretty much at every venue/transportation/shop.
I bought N95 masks a few times. It was pricey - about as much as a latte. I can't afford that every day, so I recycled the mask a few times. (This was not for COVID-19, but some other issues when my wife was in ICU and air pollution issues)
China can export those masks if they're not using them. Right now it's printing money. But even when this pandemic blows over, they'll still sell for a good price in countries without that manufacturing capacity.
they're not nearly as expensive each if you buy a box of them. I think it used to cost like $12 for 2 or $16 for 10, speaking in the before-time of course.
Eh, not in the US. I bought a 10 pack of 3M N95s last April in anticipation of forest fires that had screwed up air quality the last two years. They were $40 for the 10, so roughly the price of a latte per day.
Fortunately, the fires didn't happen, so I now have 10 masks, but I have absolutely no idea when/how the right time to bring use them is, and I'm doubtful that 10 would make the difference (my local healthy community is currently well stocked even if there's no available at retail).
Also to those wondering, the CDC says that, when worn correctly and while limiting adjustments, N95 masks can last up to 8 hours of continuous use for disease prevention. So yes, it's basically a 1-a-day thing.
The retail price of a 3M N9501V before the Cov-2 was about 4 Yuan, in mainland China, for a box of 100, plus postage (I used to buy for staff and leave on the front desk for high pollution days) which accounting for CNYUSD at the time was about $70. $40 for 10 sounds high. The current price is an order of magnitude higher (consistent with article material sourcing prices). Pricing seems very demand-elastic, and not only masks, the Just-In-Time supply-chain, regardless of China or anywhere, seems very vulnerable to low-probability (but inevitable, don't like to use the term 'black swan' as it's not, something big happens every decade) large impact events.
I'm sure hospitals in Seattle, new Rochelle, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, and LA county could use them. Really any county. 10 masks would be really helpful
I think you are right that there will be a premium on these type masks after all this blows over regardless of supply. Especially in countries that have no domestic production capabilities.
Is that surprising? You're not supposed to reuse them, so they're good for at most one day. If you work from home you might only need them for a couple of days a week, but if you're working you'll be going through multiple daily.
I think this comment just reads as an assertion made to push a narrative. If you could provide some data about the relative domestic production and export quantities it would add a lot to the discussion and community’s knowledge. Part of what makes HN such a great resource is that people share facts and reasoning to justify their opinions.
Those masks aren't N95 class meaning they can't be used by care workers. Of the N95 class masks, only 600k are manufactured daily, which isn't enough by far, especially when growth of patient numbers continues.
The N95s are for everyone expected to have direct exposure to patients with covid19. There’s no “tier” of healthcare professional that is unworthy of protection.
No human being is unworthy of protection regardless of their job; for instance, supermarket workers also require protection. However this is a limited resource so of course those with the highest risk should get them first.
Let's imagine you are a medical professional at a drive-through Corona testing facility, like the ones they just announced will be in Walmart parking lots across the country. You get fully suited up head to toe including N95 mask, googles, etc. You take a sample from ONE person, that person leaves, you now take off every piece of gear and put on a new set. You can sanitize your goggles, but the N95 mask has to be disposed of.
Let's imagine you're a nurse at an ICU. You have two patients, as is customary for most ICUs. Every 15-20 mins you have to suit up, check your patient, unsuit, resuit, check other patient. Every 15-20 mins you are using two N95 masks. You do this 3-4 times per hour 24 hours a day. And you're just the nurse. You also have doctors, respiratory therapists, techs, and other people coming in and out of the room, all of whom will be disposing of an N95 mask.
In news footage of a drive through testing center, it appears that the nurse was wearing a surgical mask over her N95 respirator, and only discarded that surgical mask in between patients, not the whole N95 respirator.
She discarded her gloves too, they didn't show enough between-patient footage to show if she disposed of the blue (paper?) overcoat she wore over her scrubs between patients too.
Does anyone here have any personal, specific, actionable knowledge of the melt-blown plastics process? Are there alternatives for achieving the N95 (or sufficient) filtration levels in a different sheet material?
Automating many steps of assembly are [more] straightforward, but this precursor material supply really is a problematic bottleneck.
Not all masks are N95 people. It's crazy the amount of grandstanding and virtue signaling going on here. I have had a P100 mask for years with filters in stock, and I am wearing it out on town if I have to.
It was funny to see all the disposable N95 masks sold out at the hardware store, but all the reusable respirators with replaceable P95 cartridges still in stock.
Nothing stops 100% of viruses. But if everyone wears something -- anything really, even a handkerchief or a piece of toilet paper -- that reduces the chance of infection by 50% for example, there will be only half as many infections compared to the case where nobody wore anything.
After a few rounds of 50% reduection, even a mediocre mask will be able to reduce the number of cases by 99%. And that's all we need to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed.
In fact, ordinary people do not need N95 masks. General medical surgical masks will do. Even as long as the mask is waterproof. After all, wearing a mask is mainly to prevent the virus from spreading through saliva.
Ordinary people benefit from the extra protection as well. N95/FFP2 masks are more effective protecting from virus in the coronavirus family and this is tested.
Obviously, the more exposed you are the more you benefit from extra measures.
> China can be all over the place. Sometimes you think you're in a Western factory. Others are kind of like a dirt floor sort of shanty trying to pass their stuff off as good as the other guys. And maybe it is.
Not representative of medical equipment manufacture in China (I trust), but an interesting look nonetheless into typical manufacturing process and it's utter lack of OSHA and environmental controls:
Right. That is why they should stop exporting their shitty masks. Other countries will just have to import the superior quality masks than NO OTHER COUNTRY is producing at the necessary scale.
Even at times of crisis, you can count on good'ol HN to supply a dose of China hatred.
With an SCBA you need a new bottle every 30 minutes or so, and carry around more than 20kg (45lbs) of stuff on your back. It's terribly exhausting, and definitely not suited to all-day use.
Surgical and homemade masks are much better than nothing. And by better than nothing we mean reasonably effective.
Going into close contact with a person who has a known transmissible respiratory illness? N95 is minimum if you are a professional. And get your union to scream bloody murder if you are not allowed this essential safety equipment, and put complaints in writing so your heirs can later sue to oblivion.
Trying to massively reduce your risk when going out for supplies, or living with someone infected and have no other options? Surgical and homemade are vastly vastly vastly better than nothing.
Extremely antisocial, harmful, dangerous? Shaming those wearing masks.
I'm using a homemade mask made from hepa filter material between two layers of dish towel material when I go out. I tie it around so it completely covers my nose and mouth and extents It will probably help if a person a few feet away coughs at me, as happened in the store today. And if I should cough, I may not infect someone else, if I am carrying.
And it may keep me from accidentally touching my face
I think people should be allowed to wear masks, but I think that a lot of this information, including a very full vision about what's going to happen in the next 6 months to 1 year, needs to come from CDC and other major institutions.
Everyone on the ground having little ad hoc debates doesn't seem like it will converge onto a nationally organized solution. The fact that this is happening is symptomatic of the lack of leadership IMO, and so instead we're getting a disorganized cascade of businesses, institutions, mayors, and governors making ad hoc calls.
HN has users from many countries, not just America. And general advice in my country is to wear mask around. Journals share step by step tutorials on how to make them. In some cities, public transport wont allow you in without one (you can improvise with scarf or something). Some stores and pharmacies wont allow you inside without one either. Politicians in photos and personalities wear masks and I think it is to normalize masks wearing. No one here wore mask one month ago, not it is most people outside.
For me it was mind boggling when two days ago HN acted like the smart consensus was "masks do nothing, they are useless and don't wear it".
It is not just "little ad hoc debates". It is also clashing between cultures I guess. There are people down threads actively convincing others not to wear masks and implying you are uneducated if you do. Unless that side of discussion stops spreading it, people who got the "wear masks for others and yourself" advice should be allowed to state their case too.
I dont really know where "dont wear masks" meme is coming from, but it seems to be against everything I hear in my country. Person you are answering to might not be American either.
Then there's places saying the opposite: "Any type of general mask use is likely to decrease viral exposure and infection risk on a population level, in spite of imperfect fit and imperfect adherence" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799/
I don't know what to think, but I've ordered some (surgical) masks.
CDC and other major institutions are looking out for the many not any one individual. They don't want there to be crazy private demand for masks competing with health care professionals.
Shows that the pandemic and associated social distancing measures may need to go on for months. How does the CDC switch messaging from saying that masks are useless to "well you should wear one now since you're going out..."
That may be true. However, if you are a normal citizen (not a healthcare worker) and you have N95 masks, you should strongly consider donating them to healthcare providers right now
There are huge shortages of these masks in most US hospitals, even in areas with limited cases (cant speak for other coutnries but assume the same is true). HCPs are forced to either treat patients without wearing masks, guaranteeing high exposure to virus, or not care for patients
If you are sheltering in place (as you should be doing if you are healhty), N95 masks wont help you much. THey will 100% help HCPs
And get your union to scream bloody murder if you are not allowed this essential safety equipment, and put complaints in writing so your heirs can later sue to oblivion.
I was talking to a doctor yesterday, from Silver Spring, Maryland, right outside of DC. They ran out of N95 masks some time ago and can't find any more. They're using simple surgical masks now. Complaining won't make those N95 masks appear any faster.
What they're doing now is that each week there is one dedicated doctor who deals with Covid cases. This is to prevent the entire department from getting infected.
Surgical/homemade masks are working only if everybody is wearing them and they just impede transmission from the wearer to other people around. If you are the only person wearing such mask, you might not impede infection by much.
I'm from Australia, and I know how to read government documents here. They very rarely lie, but you have to read them very precisely.
If you are well, you do not need to wear a surgical mask as there is little evidence supporting the widespread use of surgical masks in healthy people to prevent transmission in public.
They can say "little evidence" because only a few recent studies show that.
"A common claim is that surgical masks do not protect against respiratory viruses. This is not true. Several peer-reviewed studies in medical journals have found that correct and consistent use of surgical masks in household or community settings conferred a significant degree of protection against influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome and other respiratory virus infections, especially when combined with hand hygiene."
and
"Another misconception is that surgical masks should only be worn by symptomatic individuals. In fact, surgical masks are effective when worn by both respiratory virus-infected persons and their contacts. Furthermore, it is well recognised that even asymptomatic Covid-19 patients can still be infectious to others, rendering this recommendation inapplicable to the current pandemic.
Like other respiratory viruses, Sars-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, is largely transmitted by droplets from infected persons. Therefore, the scientific evidence in favour of mask use against other respiratory viruses is generalisable to Covid-19."
and
"have no hesitation in recommending universal mask usage for people living in neighbourhoods with community Covid-19 transmission"
By Dr Siddharth Sridhar, clinical assistant professor, Department of Microbiology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong
In this pragmatic, cluster randomized clinical trial involving 2862 health care personnel, there was no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza among health care personnel with the use of N95 respirators (8.2%) vs medical masks (7.2%).
Surgical masks are protecting patients not doctors. Please educate yourself.
"The coronavirus is an upper respiratory virus and a surgical mask does not protect you from that kind of virus,” he said. “In fact, when people buy up these masks and hoard these masks then they might not be available for healthcare providers to use for patient care.”
He said surgical masks are more effective on people who are already infected with an illness to keep them from infecting others rather than the other way around. He said other types of masks are not very effective at preventing you from getting sick either."
>“Yes, a surgical mask can help prevent the flu,” Sherif Mossad, MD, an infectious disease specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, tells Health. “Flu is carried in air droplets, so a mask would mechanically prevent the flu virus from reaching other people.” It would work both ways, says Dr. Mossad, preventing transmission of the flu virus to others and for keeping a mask-wearer from picking up an infection.
“Disposable is best and you should discard your mask after each use,” says Dr. Besser. “If a mask gets wet—and it will by simply breathing into it—the effectiveness of its protective effect is reduced.”
Are you really going to change your surgical mask every 3 minutes to make it effective against getting infected?
You obviously don't get it how a virus survives outside body. It survives because it is inside a wet biological droplet; breathing through a surgical mask would make the area around intake wet with some human cells, making it a wonderful spot for survival of viruses; it basically makes it a prime collector surface. The mask itself is permeable and whatever viruses are collected on the outer layer thrive there unless the surface was strongly antiseptic (hint: it isn't). To be safe, you'd have to change it pretty often; surgeons moreover don't touch their masks while they are performing a surgery, you probably wouldn't have such limitations. "I have seen such a mask in a Hollywood movie, that means it must work."
COVID-19 family is also pretty agile:
"The analysis of 22 studies reveals that human coronaviruses such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) coronavirus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus or endemic human coronaviruses (HCoV) can persist on inanimate surfaces like metal, glass or plastic for up to 9 days."
Do surgeons change their surgical masks every 3 minutes while performing surgery? And the operative word the doctor used is "reduced" effectiveness, not "eliminated" effectiveness.
Surgeons wear it so that their breath/mouth droplets don't end up in patient's intenstines while performing a surgery, causing an infection. For that purpose a single surgical mask can last hours (i.e. it keeps droplets on the inner surface of the mask). If they have to perform surgery on highly dangerous patients, they use hazmat suits instead:
"(N95) Masks won't protect you" was an expedient lie. How can it be that medical professionals are in dire need of N95 masks to protect them from the virus, yet they are powerless to do any good in the hands of the public?
If everybody in the US could wear one of these when out in public, we would be in a much better place. The sad truth is we don't have enough to do that, not that this would not help.
N95 is not a surgical mask. That one is a professional respirator. Yet infection can enter via eyes, so one has to wear airtight glasses as well to be sure.
There is no respirator embedded as you can see, it's just a simple piece of fabric.
The point of my original reply was that we could reduce R0/transmission rate only if everybody had to wear surgical mask in public. If you are the only one wearing it, it doesn't really help. Some EU countries now require everybody to wear a mask while shopping or using public transport.
Probably a typo/fumble finger. Wading through all the dreck it seems that it causes viral pneumonia which is always bad news.
Read just today that an advantage of any mask is it keeps people from transferring the virus from their fingers to their mouth and nose. A paper on the effectiveness of home made masks, like from tee shirt material says they are in no way a replacement for N95 masks but are better than nothing.
My understanding is that it starts as an upper respiratory virus (mainly concentrated in the throat), leading to flu/cold-like symptoms and only those unlucky ones that get it deep in their lungs attached to ACE2 receptors end up with a life-threatening lower respiratory illness requiring ICU and ventilator/ECMO due to immunity going berserk and killing off lung tissue with virus embedded in it, a cytokine storm.
People were required by law to wear (mostly homemade; the main kind available) masks during the Spanish Flu. The link below gives an account of someone being shot by a public health officer for refusing to wear one. People took it very seriously back then as a way of preventing the spread, and it's not a bad idea for now.
> Thats basically a misinformation. They are completely useless, and if you dont change them each 40-50 minutes - bring you more damage then good
Evidence required.
If mist forms on my glasses from breathing, I assume the mask must be doing something.
I read a comment the other day on how many efforts are impeded by the "quest for perfection"
I know such homemade masks are not 100% proof. But even if they only work to reduce 10% of the risks if everybody wore them, than can be the difference between a R0 of 1.1 and 1.0 - and gives great results overall.
Don't just think about yourself. We are young and at no real risk of dying (0.1%, whatever). But we may cause the death of other people by simply contaminating more people.
Small actions are better than doing nothing when facing exponential growth
So, are condoms, they fail, can be worn improperly, etc... yet they are recommend over and over for safety reason....
Same with masks, they are not perfect, they could be miss-handled, yet they provide some degree of safety and are better than nothing.... otherwise why would health officials wear them at all?
>I know such homemade masks are not 100% proof. But even if they only work to reduce 10% of the risks if everybody wore them, than can be the difference between a R0 of 1.1 and 1.0 - and gives great results overall.
There's a psychological component to this. If a mask reduces the chance of infection (from daily contact) from 60% (random number) to 54%, I'm not going to bother, even though in aggregate it might make a huge difference. That's just me though.
Also, I suspect half-measures like this are only effective in the early stages of the outbreak. For instance, if the viral load required for infection is 10 units (completely arbitrary), and your daily exposure is between 5 and 15, using a home-made mask that filters out 50% of viruses makes sense. However, if your daily exposure is 100 (presumably because everyone around you is infected), that 50% reduction isn't going to help you.
Your math assumes you are the only person using masks and have daily exposure.
It breaks down when people are in isolation, which many of us now are. You are not out daily, so a 50% reduction is a 50% reduction, and with luck you never accumulate enough to get sick.
If everyone wore masks, then every ones daily exposure would drop dramatically. You get 50% less intake, and infected people are emitting much less too. You have pretty much eliminated air born transmission, and can now focus on hands and eyes.
Don't attack others like this on HN. If someone is wrong, it's enough to provide correct information. Lashing out or trying to punish is harmful in more than one way: it damages the container and discredits the truth. (On the last point see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
Fuck off dang you filthy piece of shit, ban my ass. I post valid scientific links proving my claims and you just suck the asses of your capitalist masters like Graham who are wringing their hands at the stock losses. YOU Dan, are responsible for the shitfest that is coming. You are a terrible lackey who is harming the world and your work is finally paying off for you. Enjoy your apocalypse.
This motherfucker created a brand new account to post scientific misinformation and YOU Dan are supporting that. What the FUCK is wrong with you Dan? How insane and hateful and malevolent towards humanity can you be?
BAN SCIENCE DAN. BAN IT. HARM PEOPLE, DESTROY MANKIND. THIS IS YOUR WAY.
This is the price we pay for outsourcing our manufacturing capabilities. We should have kept in-house manufacturing alive, there is plenty of capacity for it here in the States.
> Leo Liu, a sales director at Haigong Machinery, a Chinese company that assembles the machine parts for melt-blown lines imported from the US, Germany and Japan. "Everyone is considering mask manufacturing, but they don't understand the process. Once they learn the cost of these machines, they give up."
FTA. The US does manufacture some part of the whole mask making process, but I think no country can do it alone.
I am not so sure because the cost of keeping the in-house manufacturing is also high. Consider military industrial complex, a bunch of companies had been kept alive through exclusive government contracts for 60+ years [1]. The result are companies optimizing for lobbying for maximum government dollars instead of efficiency or innovation. For example spreading the supply chain across every state: https://twitter.com/VP/status/971876888447725568?ref_src=tws...
I believe fragmentation costs of the supply chain are incredibly high. Especially when the supply chain is top down and sources complex components. A problem with the supplier causes the whole project to be delayed. I think this is a major contributing reason of some recent mega-project delays (SLS, F35, James Webb [2], your favorite mega-project here[3]...)
Breaking the site guidelines like this will get you banned, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. No more of this, please.
Your comment would be fine without the first and last sentences.
Easy to say now, but there's just not enough manpower to make _everything_ in house that we deem strategically important. And if the price isn't viable on the free market, how is it justifiable long term? I generally agree with your sentiment though.
Not enough manpower at the moment, for sure, but we should create it through education and social investment. It's generally a strategic advantage to have manufacturing capabilities no matter what discipline; it's less that we are reliant on China for this one particular thing and more that we have allowed our once-strong manufacturing muscle to atrophy. We subsidize gas heavily because it's a strategic advantage to the nation; call it a hunch but I think there are more knock-on benefits to being able to make stuff than is readily apparent (and I thought such a view would be more popular on Hacker News to be frank).
I think you are bang on with capabilities vs capacity. We should have one factory for anything critical so that in case we can’t get as much as we need on the free market we can ramp up capacity by building more of the machine that makes the product. If you don’t have all of the know how that is in that machine or plant design already in your one factory making the product you are starting from zero. Hence why all of China’s cheap labour deals had technology transfer riders.
I made a dozen good homemade masks in a few hours, and I am inept at sewing. With some practice I could make 200 a day. There's no point to doing so, it would be illegal for me to sell them.
US is doing nothing whatsoever to ramp up mask or ventilator production. It's going to result in a lot of deaths.
Doubtful, given poster said masks and not N95 masks. Like the 199 million masks being produced in China daily that are not N95 per the article. Cheap, easy to make, comfortable enough to use for extended periods of time, and reduce chances of catching and spreading respiratory disease (but not considered good enough for hospital use, at least until the good ones run out).
N95 is a high standard. N99 higher still. (Why not adopt that then?) There are also other mitigation efforts available not as good as N95 that are massively better than nothing and which are also attainable.
Insinuating as you have that only N95 is acceptable and nothing else whatsoever is acceptable means that millions will die in your universe since N95 is in the actual universe we live in unavailable at present. The perfect is the enemy of the good. But hey let's hold out for that perfection and then watch as the world incinerates.
> There's no point to doing so, it would be illegal for me to sell them.
Surely only making medical claims is illegal. You could sell them as a fashion accessory, with all sorts of funky designs. Make masks fashionable and desirable just like funky socks were made cool.
Just make sure to make it clear in your sales copy (not in fine print) that the masks are a fashion item only, don't protect against COVID19, and "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" or whatever the asscovering stuff you have to write is.
Personally I find the expert opinion on the efficacy of such masks ("unless they're n95, they're useless") nonsensical. If there's a difference between standing 1m and 3m away from an infected person, there's gotta be added value to one or both of you having a covered mouth, regardless of the material the covering is made of.
The virus is carried in tiny droplets in the air, usually from a cough or sneeze. Any mask that catches those helps prevent virus spread to and from you. So literally a bandana covering your face is going to prevent some. Of course it won't be as effective as a legit N95 or N99 mask, maybe it's only 10% as effective, but that is not the same as being totally ineffective.
Further, any form of masks provides a psychological aid to help people stop touching their face.
The main goal is minimizing leaks and making sure air flows through material. While a bandana would not be totally ineffective, there's room for innovation:
> A Hanes Heavyweight 100% preshrunk cotton T-shirt (made in Honduras) [...] was boiled for 10 minutes and air-dried
> A commercially available N95 respirator requires a fit factor of 100
> The prototype mask achieved a fit factor of 67
> We showed that a hand-fashioned mask can provide a good fit and a measurable level of protection from a challenge aerosol. [...] When made by naive users, this mask may be less effective because of variations in material, assembly, facial structure, cultural practices, and handling
What? How is it the MBAs fault that production was cheaper elsewhere and that consumers always seek the lowest prices? Do you think they should've just ran losses to cover for the rest of us in case of a global pandemic? This has nothing to do with corporate executives and everything to do with national policy.
In economic terms, under certain definitions and assumptions that are typical under modern economics, a trade war such as the current US-China trade war result in welfare losses. I believe, however, that when national security is taken into account (ie having the ability for the country to rapidly respond to productive capacity needs in a time of crisis), the trade war along with serious investment in expanding industrial capacity is likely net good.