Can someone shed some light on the difficulties of producing the "simple" surgical masks? I'm not talking about something that filters the incoming air, but the lame kind that just reduces the amount of liquids you disperse when breathing, coughing, sneezing etc.

Are they so high tech you can't just ramp up production? And how many months in advance would you need to ramp it up? We're about 3 months in and nobody got the idea to increase production of masks until about a week ago (similar for hand sanitizer, soaps etc)? What am I missing, why is that a thing?