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Comment by susanhi | Hacker News Reader

“You should wear one if you are sick”

Asymptomatic carriers are showing as a large contributor of spread. We should have a mandate for masks for everyone (since we don’t know who is a carrier or not) and government should contract manufacturers to ramp production ASAP to meet the demand.

China and South Korea has ramped productions and is allocating 2 masks per week per resident.

US has 330 million people. 2 per person is 660 million face masks.

China is currently producing 200 millions masks a day. If we ramp production to even half of that, 100 million masks a day, we can have 2 masks for everyone in less than a week.

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There was an act passed (I don't remeber its name, but it was meant for situations like this) that allows government to force factories to produce needed materials. Yet government refused to use it, they refuse to invoke stay in place in remaining states. They blocked states from doing testing, bidding against states for supplies and cherry on top DOJ secretly asked if they can suspend constitutional rights to allow holding people in cells for unspecified time among other things. WTF, it's like they want this pandemic to be as bad as possible.

We already can see most countries working and flattening the infection curve, yet US is still growing exponentially. We are now #3 and looks like we will be #1 (surpassing China and Italy) before March ends.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/03/18/coro...

Trump has invoked exactly the act you're referring to. I'm not interested in any debate, just wanted to let you know it has been done.

My bad, last time I heard an expert talking about it that the act was created exactly for this kind of event and Trump was resisting invoking it to not affect private companies. I'm glad he changed his mind.

Still, I think he should stay at home in other states. LA county seems to assume it is beyond containment and now only tests people if that would affect the treatment.

I think a big thing that isn't being said is that the government is also attempting to manage civil unrest. There is an old saying about there being a gun behind every blade of grass in this country. We have a very different culture and risk situation than a place like China where they literally welded people's doors shut and let them starve to death.

I think they know certain things need to be done, but they have to also manage expectations and make enough of the population/media/state govt be "demanding" these enforced lock downs before it is really feasible.

Lastly, I think most companies are doing the right thing. 3M is cranking out industrial N95 masks as fast as they can since the govt dropped liability protection (since they are not rated for medical use). GM and others have offered to make ventilators. The defense production act only needs to be invoked if factories/suppliers are not doing the right thing. The specifics of the invocation haven't been announced yet, but I suspect one or more companies started misbehaving, and that resulted in invoking the act.

> We should have a mandate for masks for everyone (since we don’t know who is a carrier or not) and government should contract manufacturers to ramp production ASAP to meet the demand.

Absolutely, and this is true for all countries. Personal prophylaxis and distancing will have to become a natural part of our life if we want to get out of this before the eventual remedy happens. But the masks do not exist yet.

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