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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if we could at least provide everybody with simple surgical masks. It would surely help flatten the curve a lot if we could make masks in public mandatory. As far as I understand it those are basically just paper and a nose clip. They should be very simple to mass manufacture.

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The main problem I see regarding masks is, besides price, distribution. Now that Chinese manufacturers are running again, they are producing 24/7. Sure prices are way higher than before. But the masks are there.

Problem is, Chinese suppliers sell FOB, meaning export cleared delivered to a (air)port terminal in China. Customers in Germany want to buy DDP (import cleared and delivered a specified location in Germany). There you have a structural problem. One that would be easy to overcome, if it wasn't product liability. The importer of record takes product liability in case the manufacturer is outside the EU. Good luck getting that insured (I tried). Ultimately, it will get sorted out.

The easiest way to get supplies going would be if the government did these two things:

- grant interest free loans for these products to allow importers to pay suppliers upfront (that's how this business works) for government orders

- take the product liability risk for products wutyh the proper (paper) certification

That would allow a lot of people to get this stuff. Rigjtt now it is a pain the ass.

"The main problem I see regarding masks is, besides price, distribution."

There's a crap ton of unused aircraft right now. You would just need heads of state to direct the airlines to fulfill that need, simplify clearance, customs, etc. Treat it like wartime.

Keep reading beyond the 1st sentence, he's describing bureaucracy problems, not transport problems.

Maybe read the last 2 sentences of my comment.

Both are kind of true. The air freight / train / sea freight part would ve easy enough to solve. Getting the masks distributed locally is already a little bit trickier,but I am working on something right now. Basically a regional hub, supplied by air train or sea, and a couple of Kanban loops to local distribution centers (hospitals, practices, whatever).

Maybe I can convince someone to give it a try. If not, I'll just go back building my company as planned. Would still suck so, to have look at the mess from the sidelines.

That is completely fair. I have little insight into the local issues. The country level issues are fairly easy to bypass with war level rules. From real level experience with Turkey, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, etc.

What do you mean product liability? Delivery liability or faults?

Ideally you would import it from a vetted manufacturer

I don't think anything but FOB is common, except in specific cases.

The importer is considered to be the manufacturer in case something bad happens, caused by the product. Meaning, worst case,you import a mask. It fails. Patients in the practice you supplied the mask to get infected and some die. Now we are talking tens of millions.

I asked the Allianz and Munich Re (the insurers insurer). Both declined to insure that at the moment.

Which sucks. Because the gap between FOB and DDP would otherwise just be logistics. Ignoring prices, that is rather easy to solve. I try to get hold of someone at the armed forces department charged with that. Hopefully it leads somewhere.

EDIT: Product liability is th problem. Transport insurance is easy to obtain and no problem.

Yeah speaking of that: https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-netherlands-recalls-defect...

Imagine to be a e-commerce launching itself into masks now. Without insurance, proper due Diligence of suppliers and potentially no way to track batch numbers. And then something like that happens. You are in for a lot of pain.

Apparently you can get coverage, or rather a waiver, from the government if you are a non-profit.

As a side note, the government is now seriously launching itself into procurement. For example German states are starting procurement themselves.

My concern is the rush to acquire PPE, rules be damned, a decent amount of counterfeit masks will make it into circulation, and will provide a false sense of security.

We're not talking about FFP2/3 masks here, but simple masks that mostly prevent droplets produced by the wearer from spreading as far and slightly reduce the probability of inhaling the larger ones other people produce. Basically anything that covers mouth and nose.

We have totally given up on obtaining N95 grade masks?

The masks you are talking about, we already have citizens sewing them in a large-scale volunteer effort.

N95 masks, as far as I know, are fairly difficult to manufacture, so I think it's unlikely that we can scale up production to hundreds of millions per day. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though :)

I bet someone could develop a simple mask test everyone could even do at home.

(Let’s present solutions, HN. Don’t just tell people things won’t work.)

I think this is done in Czech Republic at scale.

There are plenty of tutorials on how to make something like a surgery mask at home using basic sewing stuff or even oven paper.

These help with droplets and with reducing face touching.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22626870

Nothing money or waivers cannot solve, as long as masks are being made and China allows export. I doubt Germany, USA, Italy etc care about chartering dozens of planes just for that.

I'm not so sure. We have an ongoing toilet paper crisis that is in it's third week now and the government is unable or unwilling to do anything about it, despite ensuring everyone that there's plenty of toilet paper somewhere in some storage of some company. If a somewhat trivial problem like coordinating a few trucks is beyond their ability, I have no hope for coordinating planes and import/export.

You might say "but that's toilet paper, who cares", but empty shelves in super markets in Germany are a great way to make people remember the past and go into panic mode.

What people do right now is buy masks individually from Chinese vendors on Amazon, and they are getting shipped. If you want them quickly, you can pay for airmail. China can deliver, but for some reason, Germany doesn't take them.

Where do you have a toilet paper crisis? In north Germany at least shelves are refilled all the time. I’m back from groceries, Edeka, Lidl, and Rewe had all their shelves full.

Friends from Berlin tell me they still have empty shelves, so do the super markets in (western) Hamburg. They get refilled every few days early in the morning and are empty an hour or two later, only to sit empty for another day or two.

It's gotten so bad where I live that Aldi has apparently decided to just give up and use the space for potting soil.

The pasta shelves are re-stocked though, as is bread. Berlin isn't quite there yet.

Cause and effect, it will settle down in week or two and those who overstocked won't be buying more and those who are responsible and now short due to the hoarders of panic are slowly getting back to normal.

But certainly an insight into the culture and humanity of some people. Alas we have a society that seems to always see good responsible people suffer at the hands of the irresponsible.

I believe that the important lesson is that when government steps back, people will resort to ingrained behaviors, and "stock up when a crisis begins" is one of those. The wrong answer to that is to limit the amount anyone can buy, because you're just increasing the crisis-feel. The right answer is to make sure that people calm down, and the easiest way to do that is to demonstrate that the supply of goods is not affected. You do that by adding a fleet of trucks to transport goods to super markets and add a temporary night shift to re-stock shelves. If people see that there is no shortage, they will calm down.

The opposite is happening, you have (local, temporary) shortages and some politician who hasn't bought their own groceries in the last decade says "I assure you, there are no shortages", while everybody sees the empty shelves on a daily basis.

Bit like the ban effect, like many a record seen sales increase down to the aspect that some radio or other avenue deemed to ban the record.

Equally, once many heard news of something was being brought up, the net effect was to drive others into panic and drive them to do the same.

Panic begats panic. So you start to enter into the aspect of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology

I'm in Hamburg, only spaghetti and hand sanitizer are still sometime missing in my neighborhood. During the past 2 weeks you could see some empty shelves depending on the time of the day, but it seemed to be temporary, due to the rapid increase in demand.

But now that people filled their shelves, I guess that store supplies are back to normal.

In America,I’m in Silicon Valley so people have money and space in their relatively large houses to store lots of stuff. Stores did not limit purchases early so there was panic buying early even here. Popular stores like Trader Joe’s and Costco have lines out the door for several hundred feet (they limit the number of people inside and everyone outside is six feet apart) but less popular grocery stores/green grocers do not based on my limited excursions on bike. Now purchases are limited but still some items run out because it takes more time for someone to stock items on shelves versus people just pulling it off.

Makes sense. I didn't consider that people in the US have way more place at home to store food. And I understand that people don't have grocery stores that close to their house/apartment, so they fill the car as much as they can.

Same in UK, least form my experience - was a blip and all those who overstocked now saturated and with that, not an issue - just the run hit supply chain demand and gave the impression of a shortage when it was only a short-term shortage due to panic buyers over-stocking.

But people worried about non-fire safe cladding seemed equally happy to fill their homes with flammable paper - the hypocrisy of madness plays out in many ways.

People aren't pooping more than usual and toilet paper production is not lower than usual. There is just an irrational run on toilet paper. There is no crisis.

There may be enough toilet paper somewhere but it's not where people want it: on the shelves.

People aren't rational actors, and by saying "they don't really need toilet paper", you're not solving the issue that is people seeing empty shelves for toilet paper, bread and soap and thinking that the system is failing.

You don't want the public to become nervous, ever. Nervous people make terrible decisions. And for a government to look uncaring/impotent is the way to make the population nervous.

It doesn't really make sense to increase toilet paper production though. There's no long-term increased demand, so the problem will probably sort itself out in a couple of weeks once everybody who has been panic buying already has a stockpile.

The trust damage will be done by then. It's like a stock market crash because of some irrational behavior. Sure, "it'll sort itself out in a few months", but you'll have companies going under, mass layoffs etc by then.

Also, I don't know whether they'd actually need to increase production. According to super market chains, they have more than enough but it's in their storage centers and they have issues/aren't prioritizing getting it into the stores.

Exactly, it's akin to a run on a bank - if all account holders of any bank withdraw all their money at once - NO bank would cope with that. Though a run on toilet paper just hit the supply chain, so you get these bumps. Come mid to end of summer, there will be a surplus of toilet paper due to the run of panic buyers fueling panic buyers all over-stocked.

My personal theory is, that the German entity tasked with procurement has no idea how international commerce works.

I saw a intriguing change in conversations I had over the last couple of days. First it was, like, no need, we got this. Just yesterday I found a call for an offer from the Armed Forces procurement department in my Inbox, while you now find direct contact details for these kind of things online. Not sure what happened, but there sure is a change in how authorities are approaching this.

It can be DIYed. https://diymask.site/ Not perfect but any protection would be good.

Or you could just use a scarf/cloth mask for nearly the same effect without tapping into actual medical supplies.

People who are handy with a sewing machine can even make pretty decent ones themselves [0]

[0] https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/best-materials-make-diy-...

If a sick person wears a masks and keeps coughing into it. Does that person go around during the day with a mask filled with phlegm and spit. sounds disgusting and stupid.

Wrong. Surgical masks use exactly the same material as N95 respirators - melt-blown non-woven polypropylene, only much thinner.

This material is extremely difficult to produce, which makes it hard to scale on short notice, so its price in China shot up 50 times.

Yes. Or things like oxygen.

There are so much more things than ventilators that are much easier to scale.

Making oxygen is easy. I’m sure half the people on this site can fill a soda bottle with pure oxygen using a machine hacked together from just things found in an average kitchen.

Industrial scale production, transport, making sure it doesn’t set everything on fire, and supplying a medically appropriate quality without risking hyperoxia? That’s hard.

At least there is industrial oxygen production that could be repurposed.

Also oxygen enrichers could be made and distributed, they could also help some people. I know of a person who made one themselves in a week. Both should be a lot easier than ventilators (which of course also should be pursued).

If you read the reports from Italy, they first ran out of ventilators, then CPAP machines and finally even oxygen.

But for some reason the talk is very concentrated on ventilators for now.

Also other equipment saves lives. Pulse oximeters so those needing help breathing can be identified. Protective equipment. A lot of things that save lives and are a thousand times easier to make than ventilators.

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