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Hospitals do seem to graciously accept donations, even opened (half-used) boxes of masks. You can just drive up and hand them off. Second-tier healthcare facilities, such as elder care centers and rural clinics, are also desperate for PPE right now.

We just drove up to the UCSF hospital and dropped off a couple hundred pounds of supplies. No fuss:

https://www.rinse.com/blog/rinse/covid-19-medical-supply-dri...

Here's an example organization with a long list of facilities accepting donated supplies:

https://www.donateppe.org/

I'm sure it's harder to convince the terribly inefficient US health care bureaucracy to pay for this. I noticed our local Chinese American community, combating a worrisome rise in racism, has been active in the philanthropic distribution of masks. You might try raising funding that way, instead of through the bureaucracy.

I've also noticed a reluctance to accept the Chinese KN95 standard. People don't trust it, for better or worse. I think they would rather have homemade cloth masks, to be honest. Not sure how you can change that perception.

Best of luck in your efforts!

The economic reality is that most of the chinese supply chain that creates most of the masks is KN95 because China mobilized their country for their needs first. Quality is definitely an issue, but the bureaucratic layers of many of the hospitals in the US are definitely protecting the business at the expense of the safety of front line workers. Most of them simply don't understand what is going on at the ground level of the supply chain.

As someone who spends way too much time hanging around with cynical lawyers I am not surprised by the current state of affairs.

We've spent the last 30yr using civil case law to heavily incentivize organizations to build process and follow that process even when it's stupid, push decision making higher up and remove the capacity for decisions making down low (like middle manager level) where they can happen fast.

It's not that the people want to protect the business at the expense of patients but that the business itself is structured in a way that it's impossible for the people who make it up to do break protocol that says they have to meet X Y and Z criteria when sourcing supplies without it being a fire-able offense.

I think the KN95 issues is also a legal/health standards one. I don't know if the FDA can waive that unilaterally but they should prob think about it.

The FDA recently said they would not block import of KN95s, and also issued an EUA on April 3rd that allows approved KN95s to be used in medical applications.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/the-fda-no...

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/personal-protective-equi...

That is fantastic news, thank you for sharing!!!

Hospitals do seem to graciously accept donations, even opened (half-used) boxes of masks. You can just drive up and hand them off. Second-tier healthcare facilities, such as elder care centers and rural clinics, are also desperate for PPE right now.

There's a significant difference between donating to or working with hospitals and doing the same with medical professionals working in hospitals.

Particularly for small donations like a partial box those are probably being allocated out directly by and to clinical staff in need.

While not perfect (we could have definitely acted sooner) the Czech system of handling PPE distribution seems to have worked so far: - banned export of sanitizer and drugs early on

- banned sale of FFP3 class respirators to anyone else than healthcare providers and the state

- required everyone to wear masks in public of any type (this is rather important as it both prevents asymptomatic carriers from spreading the infection & remove the mask stigma by everyone having one)

- this triggered a huge wave of basically everyone with a sewing machine & some fabric making masks, by now (~third week of masks) basically everyone is stocked and is quite easy to buy a had made mask online or get it from your local administration (there are now even some mask vending machines)

- started an air bridge from China (various aircraft - from the government, chartered & NATO leased An-124s, planes appropriated from various airlines), so far 500+ tons of PPE and medical supplies have been acquired

- material distribution is handled by the state (army, firefighters & sometimes even the police) to all the hospitals, care homes, for police, social workers, etc.

required everyone to wear masks in public of any type (this is rather important

Have any studies been done on this? It seems pretty tenuous to me and lots of assertions about mitigations (from drugs to masks) are being made just now without evidence.

Yes. Lots of studies linked in https://medium.com/better-humans/whats-the-evidence-on-face-....

Turns out stopping droplets helps slow the spread of a virus that spreads via droplets. Shocker, I know.

Thanks for the link. The vast majority of the studies cited there are in fact in a hospital setting. I'm skeptical masks worn in the street are going to help more than distancing measures, though they'd probably help in crowded environments like public transport (along with hand washing).

They are to be used in conjunction with distancing measures, handwashing, etc. They are not a replacement for it.

Here's one on homemade masks; they work better than nothing, not as well as surgical/N95: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24229526

You definitely want to do both & ideally much more. But yet again, even even if mask provided zero protection, as long as it reduces spread from asymptomatic carriers, it is a big win. But for that everyone needs to wear them - which is happening here in Czech republic.

Just today a went for a walk through the second largest Czech city. The weather was nice and there were people in the streets, though a lot less than normally, with the usually crowded spots totally empty due to all the restaurants still being closed.

To cut things short, the number of people without mask I saw during this hour and a half walk that were not wearing a mask ?

1

Latest advice from the WHO is that masks are not useful outdoors unless you have symptoms.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/no-need-for-he...

Clearly the effects are at least cumulative. The lowest estimate for transmission with a homemade mask is 50% reduction, that's better than 100%

More recent data strongly suggests that even people with no symptoms at low risk who have been sheltering in place should be wearing masks in public. I read an article over the weekend (which I unfortunately can't find now, although I found some similar ones) that described people on a plane with an infected passenger-- the rate of infection for healthy people wearing masks was literally zero, while those without masks was like 40%. I can't verify this now, but I have turned up a lot of articles describing how the official advice has changed on this.

I have a friend in a mid-size midwestern town in the U.S. whose mayor just put out a bulletin advising that everyone wear masks.

Similarly, there's at least one study out of China related to this recent outbreak showing the infection rate of the front line staff in hospitals (who were given N95 respirators) as zero, while the infection rate among other departments (radiology, etc) which were not wearing masks as much higher. That despite them calculating the front line staff having ~700% more exposure to the virus.

I know we want to study and confirm everything, but it seems like a real no-brainer that wearing a mask that filters droplets would reduce your disk of infection from an airborne virus generally spread via droplets.

And we're not talking about this in a hospital context, simply as harm reduction. As long as respirators are not an option for most of the general public due to supply issues, etc, then anything which reduces the infection rate is /better than nothing/, even if it isn't perfect.

I think you and others are making a lot of assumptions here - outside a hospital setting with trained staff and fitted masks to keep out virus-saturated air other vectors may be far more important.

There are reasons health experts around the world have not bothered to recommend general wearing of masks before other measures. Most people don't have the discipline to wear masks properly, not touch them, sterilise them, clean masks and all their clothes when they get in etc.

It is a mistake to think “wear a mask” advocacy is actually “wear a mask and do nothing else” advocacy.

It’s one of several things one should be doing.

You asked for studies but you're going to get a bunch of Medium blog posts written by tech-bros who've half-read, and misunderstood, a bunch of research that says that masks don't really do much to stop droplets getting in nor getting out and that masks are probably not useful to prevent covid-19

There's a delusional belief on HN that the only way people are infected is by breathing in droplets, and all the other routes (fecal-oral, ocular, hand to mouth nose or eyes) are ignored, even those these are probably the main route of infection.

I'm sure you'll be citing studies that demonstrate this, right?

There is no denying that wearing masks slows the spread. But how much do fabric masks with no filter, which allow most droplets through, slow the spread? I would appreciate any in reference to studies/indications on which fabrics might be appropriate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24229526

> Both masks significantly reduced the number of microorganisms expelled by volunteers, although the surgical mask was 3 times more effective in blocking transmission than the homemade mask.

Stopping droplets entirely isn't as critical as slowing them down. That's why the homemade masks still require the six foot social distancing.

Just gotta like my nose in, as a medical professional involved in procuring PPE for my small health chain:

We run into fraud and scammers trying to take advantage of our desperation on a daily basis. Probably about 20% of our supply leads. So, yeah, there’s a definite element of wariness - we don’t just take anything from anyone at random. Lives depend on us sourcing actual equipment, rather than squandering limited resources on falling for a scam. And, you know, not being the FBI, for many of us this falls to a lone harried admin plus-or-minus their boss talking it over and making a gut call before moving on to put out the next fire.

I just went to Whole Foods (hopefully for the last time in quite a while.) everyone there was wearing a mask (customers and employees) fear of shame be damned.

Also hearing “Shiny Happy People” while everyone is literally up to their eyeballs in PPE afraid to be near each other is a weird experience.

"Shiny Happy People" might be more appropriate than it seems. Many consider the song to be an imitation of dystopian propaganda.

That's funny, considering:

>“It’s a fruity pop song written for children. It just is what it is”, Michael Stipe told the BBC’s Andrew Marr in 2016.

Artists don't always accurately describe what their works mean. John Lennon insisted that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" has nothing to do with LSD :)

> fear of shame be damned

I hope that starts to become more socially accepted now. The thing that's always stopped me from wearing my mask as early as February was all the news reports of people being assaulted for wearing a mask on a subway. Like no good deed goes unpunished.

You're definitely not calling the right hospitals. In LA, hospitals have been accepting donations of masks from people, and purchasing them from local companies. No bureaucracy involved.

And it's now rare to see people not wearing masks in LA.

I think he's trying to offer his supply channel to hospitals that are talking about being desperate for supplies.

People keep talking about donations, but the reality is that this is a crisis of supplies, not a crisis of money. My experience matches the parent comment here.

Knowing OP is someone selling the wariness is all the more reasonable. Random internet stranger trying to sell masks, figuring out if they are legit or not is a valid concern before spending money.

That is correct, but again, the reality is that the whole supply chain comes from China and fake 3M masks also exist. Also, no one is telling the hospitals not to ask for samples and test the goods themselves. The problem is that the hospitals don't even understand what they're up against on the supply side, and they have an expectation that 'legit' masks will just show up.

I've been knee deep in this stuff for the last two weeks or so, the article in this post is accurate from what I've seen on the supply side. This is also another accurate article - https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2020/03/30/i-spent... One thing worth pointing out is the article points to the sheer number of supplies leaving the country due to hospitals being unable to pay quickly enough. All I can say is, the demand is real, the supply is constrained, and not all the 'random internet people' are scammers - a lot of them are people with very deep resources and relationships in China actually trying to do their part to bring PPE.

In the end, donations aren't going to solve this problem. Reliable supply chains are, and reliable supply chains require that some small profit be made to cover material costs, cost of risk, cost of storage, etc.

Kaiser California was part of an attempted $39 million scam related to masks and other medical equipment just a week ago. Luckily they did their due diligence and no money changed hands, but there are a lot of scammers out there claiming to have masks who can't actually back up their claims.

If the OP actually has those masks, and can prove he owns the inventory and that they are what he claims they are, he wouldn't be having any issues selling them right now.

What? I live in LA and the majority are not wearing masks. At least on the westside. It's very casual still in some areas. Thankfully I don't see mother's taking their kid to soccer practice still.

Went to the market today on the west side and it was probably 50-50 masks, maybe more masks than not. I think our sample sizes are just too low to draw exact numbers but its still much higher than last week.

I haven't been to the Westside since they imposed Safer at Home, but east of the 405 at least half of the people are wearing masks, and in some neighborhoods almost everyone is.

Does it make sense to wear masks in the outside though? suppose I have a limited number of masks, should I keep them for indoor public spaces, such as public transportation or doctor's waiting room?

According to this article, masks can be reused (and critically, retain their electrostatic charge) by baking in an oven for 30 minutes at 160 F or steaming for 3-10 minutes (this article says 3, the CDC site says 10 I think):

https://utrf.tennessee.edu/information-faqs-performance-prot...

The CDC recommends not reusing masks, but sometimes it may be necessary.

Another option is to have 5 masks in a paper bag and rotate them every day. The virus should be dead after 5 days.

Another option I read is to steam a mask in the microwave using a plastic bag with 60ml (6 tbsp) of water for 3-10 minutes once steam is generated.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/ppe-strategy/d...

I am only passing on information I read and am not qualified to judge its accuracy.

There will be another scandal with infected masks, it is bound to happen. At one point, a large percentage of the population is infected unknowingly, and manufacturing masks in a pure environment won’t be easy.

Unlikely. Lifespan on nonorganic surfaces is limited to a few days.

Some studies already say they survive 7 days on masks, and a flight is only a few hours.

HN is really becoming an echo chamber where there is only one leading trend, downvoting to hell the various opinions, and it is really bad for HN’s ability to help entrepreneurs anticipate on trends.

Do you have a link to these studies? I haven’t heard of a study showing viability this far out (vs showing the presence of viral nuclei acids, which is not sufficient for infection)