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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Which is enough for 14 days for ~50,000 people at 1/day. It seems like huge overkill when stated as a single number, but two weeks is a reasonable amount to plan for, especially for reserves at a time when the supply chain is stressed.

I wish our hospitals' administration had as much foresight. I think this crisis is making it clear that management in health care is vastly overpaid.

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If you're wearing an n95 mask for particulate pollution there isn't a particular reason why you can't reuse it.

When I heard the numbers, I figured they purchased extra so they could also supply them to the surrounding community so as to avoid drama about facebook employees having masks while few others did.

I mean, they're good for 8-10 hours, but they don't last indefinitely.

As far as I’ve heard, this is what the label recommends; however, in practice, they can be used for much longer.

(I cannot remember my sources, sorry.)

Wore mine for 2 weeks during the fires when they were in short supply. It was definitely worse for wear at the end. And mine didn't have a valve on it. If it did, it might have lasted longer.

I used to mow 1/2 acre of Bermuda grass at least once a week from May - October on a riding mower. Would take 2 1/2 hours. I used the n95's you get at Home Depot and would reuse them for many weeks and probably could have continued to reuse them until I couldn't breath through them or the straps broke. They're for stopping particulates so as long as they're not clogged they still work. If the particulates are infectious virus particles then reuse becomes more problematic but they still filter particles.

Self reply to all others: try doing something that actually tests the limits a bit for health reasons. you can tell in a welding/woodshop when N95s and P100s go bad, they get physically harder to breath through after about 6-8 hours. If they don't they're not sealed well enough. they do keep working longer (probably), but they get quite a bit worse.

Doesn't really apply to the situation being discussed. You can absolutely wear it for two weeks during the fires. It will work just fine even well sealed. Not sufficient particulate matter in the air to be significant blocker.

The filtration doesn't run out when working with particulates, it actually gets better. The reason you have to replace them is they get too good at filtering and it restricts natural breath (or they get damaged).

In this situation, you assume the mask catches particles containing coronavirus. The mask becomes a biohazard pretty quickly. They could probably be safely disinfected and reused.

Hospitals only get paid for actually treating people. Many of them have asked for financing for disaster preparation, but nobody was willing to pay for it.

It truly is insane how quickly the severity of the crisis ramped up. Monday co-workers on slack were messaging how the flu was more of a worry, after Wednesday it was mandatory work from home. And it truly feels like medical authorities were as caught off guard as the rest of us. Who was on guard duty? Was no one monitoring the situation? No one thought to increase production of PPE or RNA tests?

The US had a pandemic response team, who's job it would have been to be on guard duty. They were "let go" in 2018 to reduce wasteful government spending.

I think this single news story is the best answer to your question:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-n...

My other comment on this was flagged, which had far more links. I'm not 100% sure why it was flagged other than the voting revealed it to be very controversial.

And it makes you wonder how exactly healthcare $$$ is flowing through the supply chain. It obviously isn't tied up in equipment inventory or logistics management. Time to shake the healthcare-costs tree and see what falls out!

I believe the healthcare system is so bloated because of a lack of competition. It made news when Trump pushed for legislation that would force hospitals to tell you how much they cost. Think about that. Setting aside all the arguments that it shouldn't be left up to the free market at all, in what world can a marketplace be healthy without something so basic as price disclosure?

Good point, I know that healthcare price disclosure is legally required in Australia. I wonder how the systems compare.

If you trace through the hospital's costs, it seems like a bulk of healthcare money ends up in the pockets of medical device companies. In my opinion, it doesn't seem like competition is behaving naturally at that level either. It seems like these companies are using the healthcare flustercluck as a proxy for anti-competitive behavior.

>I wish our hospitals' administration had as much foresight. I think this crisis is making it clear that management in health care is vastly overpaid.

Facebook has just a tad bit more money to prepare for these remote possibilities compared with your average hospital. Plus hospitals have to justify every cost in relation to how many lives it will save. Is prepping for a once in a century pandemic going to save more lives than having an extra doctor on staff for every shift? Almost everyone would have answered no to that questions up until a few weeks or months ago.

This isn’t a remote possibility. The California wildfires were real. People were wearing N95 masks last year due to the wildfires. There was even a famous article about a couple who had their engagement pictures taken wearing N95 masks due to the california wildfires, which you could see in the background of the photos. And since global warming is actually a real thing, we could project more wildfires for this year.

It isn’t a “remote” possibility that facebook employees end up needing respirators since it isn’t a “remote” possibility that there will be wildfires again in California this year. That is what is expected to happen.

Although it’s hard to tell what will be the impact of the global shut-downs reducing greenhouse gases on global temperatures this summer (if that will even have any impact so soon).

You focused on the wrong end of my comment. I was defending the choices of the hospitals and not criticizing the choices of Facebook.

My apologies. Misunderstood your statement.

I would still say that having stockpiles of PPE is good management. My sister is a nurse and she had been complaining about having to find gloves last year, long before there even was a crisis. Some of these hospitals really do skimp on equipment. Just In Time and LEAN practices are cool, but you need to keep a stock of backups enough to last a month or two in the event of a shortage where every other hospital is also trying to produce the same equipment. Some might say it’s easy to say this in hindsight, but I’ve been hearing about these practices long before this crisis. Right now everything on the news about these shortages just echoes what many healthcare professionals already knew and were concerned about. There are systemic management issues in the medical industry. Hopefully a bill comes from this.

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