Why N95 masks are hard to make
npr.org
npr.org
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Thanks for writing this, I don't think it gets said often enough (or at all).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
We all have difference preferences so don’t attribute yours to others.
Let me mention one then: ATMs.
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.
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
Municipal water service versus hand pumped well
E-ZPass versus tollbooth attendant.
Festool Domino biscuit jointer versus me doing it by hand
Sheetrock versus plaster and lathe
P.S.: I don't miss nowadays the increase of human-induced Coronavirus infection risk when I experience human-free services.
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
A self-checkout is not automation, it's simply transferring the same amount of work from the paid employee to the customer
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.
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.
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.
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.
NNSY fails a significant portion of welder applicants just because they can't lay a proper weld. They pay... a lot of money.
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.
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.
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.
Makes sense, getting it made in China seems like a bad idea
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.
I agree that in today's colloquial usage there is little distinction between the two.
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.
All the more reason to get started immediately.
The people that are maintaining those skills and learning the new skills needed are increasingly elsewhere.
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.
- People can learn from Rome's mistakes.
- Rome did at least some farming.
- Rome is no more.
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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.
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.
An interesting article here about some history: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/05/8113874...
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.
e.g. "Five months worth of supplies were used by one hospital in six days" [1]
How's any country supposed to stockpile enough at that rate?
And stockpiles require upkeep and evergreening. Otherwise things like masks eventually expire [2]. Upkeep costs money too.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2] https://nationalpost.com/news/world/ontario-stockpiled-milli...
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.
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.
Also - it should be possible to design simple protocols to rotate the stock properly. Storage costs due to increased space is unavoidable ofc.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirators-st...
[2] https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2009/10/14/n95/
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://fastlifehacks.com/n95-vs-ffp/
[2] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
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.
Citation needed. The American Revolutionary War, The American Civil War, WWI, WWII, just to name a few, all involved belligerents with significant economic interdependence.
I now think that this is getting us prepared to have a world war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Isn't copyright also a prisoners dilemma?
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...
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.
Trump 0 Europe 1
I think she is just half bad and predictable but I don't think it is the best argument for the condition of the commission.
This XY vs Trump shit isn't very convincing and I do believe that it is pretty though for people really caring about politics.
The cureVac thing is suspicious as there are conflicting reports.
> 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.
0: https://mobile.twitter.com/CureVacAG/status/1239535638359281...
It's a circus.
I would like the EU to take more control over manufacturing protection gear and ventilators, and distribute them as needed over the EU.
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).
"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.
When doing the arithmetic, a term for “national security” may have been underweighted or entirely left out.
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.
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.
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. ...
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Might be a more liveable, more resilient, better for the environment, and for quality of life (which is not the same as "more gadgets") idea though...
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.
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...
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...
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.
Even if one doesn't "buy a new phone" it's still affected by a society hell bent on such trivia.
Have you got a source on that? The data I can find [1] says 600 total have closed between 2009 and 2018.
[1] https://bfmbusiness.bfmtv.com/entreprise/depuis-janvier-il-y...
from this source: https://fr.slideshare.net/dcousquer/2018-un-ralentissement-e... , slide 5.
This has been more or less the trend from 2001 to 2016. There was a slight upturn for 2017-2018, then it went down again in 2019.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
American manufacturing output has grown since 1990 [1]. What it’s been losing is manufacturing employment.
Having more people making a similar number of things does nothing for national security.
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.
[1] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-american-food-giant-...
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.
I guess a piecewise affine function is just too complicated...
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?
3M and Prestige Ameritech are the only companies with the ability to manufacturing N95 masks in the US from US sourced materials.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/shortages-confusion-an...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/15/coronavir...
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.
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?
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.
Wow, that is not enough.
When this thing blows over, no one will buy an N95 mask anymore, and the capital investment will have been wasted, and possibly never be recovered.
Probably the only people making any real money on masks are the hoarders, that collect and sell it for triple the price.
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.
That is what we have to live with.
https://www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553(18)30140-8/pd...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4699414/
https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/can-uv-light-disi...
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 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.
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.
[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3373043/#!po=12...
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?
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.
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.
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.
Is there a quick, effective and easy sanitizing protocol for N95 masks that you think would work for hospitals that are short on masks?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was going to DIY. Soak in brine then dry the thing.
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.
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.
My microwave works fine with metal inside. Would only be a problem for some people.
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.
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.
still, one of them can last a few days in a pinch.
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.
Do you know how long of an exposure is needed to be effective? assuming within 2-3 feet but single source not even light
Is there any guidance regarding duration of UVC radiation exposure and sterilization?
https://www.amazon.com/Munchkin-Portable-Sterilizer-Viruses-...
And yes normal masks do work.
Once again the medical community needed 100% and people thinking of they are clever because they know a factoid are hurting reality.
That’s an insane number of masks.
Does one in seven Chinese wear a fresh one every day? Is this gonna be the new normal?
http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/447121O/filter-change-out...
China doesn't hoard masks, but sends them to various countries that have been hit hard.
(EDIT: and I see the downvotes, and cringe inside that even humanitarian aid is seen as a valid target for anti China hate)
Not to mention there a are only 8k active covid cases in China now.
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 think a lot of Asian people wore the cheap cloth ones. I have learned recently that these sometimes have replaceable inserts inside them.
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.
Wear creates and enlarges pores, and also, pores of the right size get clogged resulting in more flow over pores that are too large to filter.
And in your example, if pores are 0.1-0.3micron, and you have uniform 0.2micron particles hitting it, yes. But reality isn't usually so uniform.
Shards of glass will create more problems for the filter media than shredded N95 mask dust :)
A mask covered in saw dust will slow down and make a particle hit against the filter more turbulent = less chance of forcing its way through.
The normal is wearing them to protect others, not yourself.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: Forgot to add the citation
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/hcwcontrols/recommendedguid...
Your temperature as well as your mask compliance will be checked pretty much at every venue/transportation/shop.
Source (in french): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQD_-2KI244
Automating many steps of assembly are [more] straightforward, but this precursor material supply really is a problematic bottleneck.
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.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/pdfs/UnderstandDifferenceInf...
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.
Even at times of crisis, you can count on good'ol HN to supply a dose of China hatred.
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.
/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
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.
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.
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?
That just means the mask doesn't fit well, and air is going in and out the top instead of through.
https://blog.genealogybank.com/the-history-of-the-great-1918...
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
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.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-rese...
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..."
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.
E.g. WHO: "a medical mask is not required, as no evidence is available on its usefulness to protect non-sick persons." https://www.who.int/publications-detail/advice-on-the-use-of...
NPR: "the scientific evidence that 'there might be a benefit for people in the community wearing [surgical] face masks is very, very meager.'" https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/01/29/8005317...
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.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440799/
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 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.
FTA. The US does manufacture some part of the whole mask making process, but I think no country can do it alone.
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]...)
1. Since 1961 per Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...
2. Nobody built one before, but I feel like a lot of the screw ups could have been avoided.
3. Being a little facetious, mega-projects are hard.
https://news.3m.com/blog/3m-stories/3m-responds-2019-novel-c...
US is doing nothing whatsoever to ramp up mask or ventilator production. It's going to result in a lot of deaths.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/16/8149292...
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.
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.
Further, any form of masks provides a psychological aid to help people stop touching their face.
> 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
From "Simple Respiratory Mask" (2006) http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1206.051468
edit: formatting
Why do you think that? Couple minutes of googling:
https://news.3m.com/blog/3m-stories/3m-responds-2019-novel-c...
https://www.venteclife.com/page/covid19-coronavirus-ventec-l...
The Hong Kong kind is simple enough (and it also suggests a transparent shield):
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic...
Video on youtube: