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Comment by srcmap | Hacker News Reader

Western countries need to spend more energy on mask productions.

I heard the mask production automation lines cost $50K to $100 in China and TW. Now the price for machines and production materials are 5-10 times the normal.

But once setup, 95% - 99% of the process is automated. There are zero pollution and it is neither labor nor capital intensive. Do need the logistic and abilities to source some raw materials. If setup, the next few months would be like printing $$$$.

TW can make 10 millions masks per day now. China has production line making 110 millions mask per day. They were able mobilized the industries like war time - TW actually send enlist Army personnels to the factory to help out.

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In general the switch to just-in-time for everything was a fair-weather decision. You goose can your margins when things are great, too bad about your supply chain when things are less than great.

This is probably OK for ice cream and computer hardware. Less so for medical supplies.

Right. And everyone understands this when it's the military: If you can't make more missiles at home, then you are a pawn of whoever you buy them from. We ought to have taken a similar line on a lot of medical supplies, especially those likely to be useful at whole-population scale.

Yup. In mainland China they repurposed car assembly lines to mask production (there's not much car selling anyway). Western countries need to copy at least some of those measures.

Some Chinese manufacturing (or maybe a lot, I don't know) is still based on low wage advantages. Those factories are much easier to repurpose than factories in high wage countries that are optimized like race cars to maximize worker productivity. I wouldn't be surprised if a European car manufacturer would find it challenging to switch an engine factory from diesel to petrol with less than a year run up time.

Would it be a bad idea for the government to have a reserve for healthcare workers for the next time this happens? To slowly sell off what is there, and to restock to create a buffer. And in a time of crisis, have a large amount that can only be bought by healthcare workers.

You're describing the Strategic National Stockpile. Apparently it didn't get restocked after the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. https://abcnews.go.com/US/medical-providers-fearing-equipmen...

The Washington Post said 5m out of 35m masks were expired.

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