Six months in, N95 mask shortages persist
npr.org
npr.org
3M and Honeywell are responding to HHS and DoD contracts by double or tripling their monthly output (admittedly, most of their factories are outside the U.S., in China and other places).
According to Statistica, monthly production of these masks will rise from 45 million units in January 2020 to 180 million units by end of year. Maybe this is insufficient but it's certainly better than nothing.
One issue is the difficulty and expense of producing meltblown textile, the material that traps microscopic particles so effectively. Currently this material is in shortage, and manufacturers are reluctant to build expensive machinery to make it when the demand may not exist a year from now.
One could make a case that the government should guarantee such companies from loss, to encourage short term investment.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1135072/us-n95-mask-prod...
2. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2020-09-10/sca...
3. https://news.yahoo.com/dr-ger-increases-n95-respiratory-1555...
The seal isn't quite as good as a proper N95, but it beat surgical, and even surgical gets you almost all the way there.
The [CDC tested them](https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/respirators/testing/results/...) and their quality control leaves a lot to be desired.
If the variance for just 10 masks was so incredibly high, who knows how crappy the 99th percentile mask they produce is?
after that any mask would help with appropriate behavior, which requires nothing but political quality
The fundamental trouble is that effective masks like N95 require special melt-blown plastic in order to filter out particles whilst still allowing people to breathe through them, there's limited production capacity, and the equipment to make it has long lead times and limited production capacity itself. There's no clever way around this. For example, invoking the Defense Production Act wouldn't help despite how hard the media pushed this idea because the companies literally couldn't make any more masks, so ordering them to do so would be completely and utterly pointless. And it's not like there are other materials that work as well either.
The reason why "The market is, in fact, glutted with face shields. But the U.S. is still far short of the 3.5 billion masks that public health officials say are needed this year." is not because of a lack of central co-ordination, it's because pretty much any old manufacturer can produce face shields (people were even making them at home on small scales with 3D printers for a while) but N95 masks are really specialized things.
That's not entirely true. The DPA would've allowed them to direct the existing production to where it was needed most. Instead, individual states wound up competing against each other on the open market, driving prices up and directing quite a bit of supply to places where it wasn't needed yet.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2020-04-07/...
Only partially, in the least coordinated of fashions, and while simultaneously telling states to DIY it. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/19/trump-governors-cor...
With extra fires, newly emerging awareness of how viruses actually work, and with understanding that we need stockpiles (and not just on federal level) the demand should hold pretty well. At least I hope so, because collapsing demand would mean people didn't learn anything.
masks are a distraction at best, helping only at the margins when worn vigorously where distancing is not possible. we don’t need to solve a mask shortage problem, but rather the social distancing problem that masks are only marginally helpful for.
npr loves talking incessantly about masks, both as virtue signal and click getter, even in stories where its utterly, entirely irrelevant.
Wat.
This study[1] from China reports on infections at one hospital in Wuhan in January.
Of 493 medical staff, 278 were in the "quarantine" area. This included the respiratory department that would have had very intimate contact with the infected. There were zero cases of SARS-Cov-2 among the staff.
Of the 213 staff from other departments that were _not_ in close, continuous contact with the infected (but also not taking infection control measures), there were 10 cases in a less than three week span.
Masks are in no way "marginally" helpful. If worn properly and used alongside other basic measures such as hand washing, they are extremely effective even in absence of social distancing measures.
This meta-study[2] compiles information on effectiveness from a dozen different studies across healthcare and non-healthcare groups. Effectiveness varies, but almost every single study shows decreased transmission with masks. Taken at aggregate among those that weren't healthcare workers, your risk of infection is halved by wearing a mask.
The CDC has repeatedly claimed that if everyone wore a mask the outbreak in the US would be under control in one to two months.
Simply social distancing does not remove the risk of infection as we've seen time and time again. The droplets don't hit some magical barrier as soon as they're 2 metres away from the source.
Masks are not virtue signalling or safety theater.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7134426/ [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7253999/
the CDC provides no plausible causal chain to believe masks by themselves would contain the outbreak.
you've provided no plausible causal chain that a falling droplet will suddenly shoot a virus particle right up your nose into that juicy bronchial mucus the virus loves, that a mask would prevent with high certainty.
in the real world, where masks are of highly varying quality and the general usage is poor at best, distancing, even modestly, does the heavy lifitng.
I assume you didn't read it because they very clearly separate the studies of healthcare workers and non-healthcare workers, including at least 3 studies covering a household setting with infected living alongside uninfected.
Any of your points that aren't covered in that meta-analysis are easily addressed by other readily available literature.
I replied in good faith assuming maybe you were just unaware, but I can see now you're intentionally ignorant.
I'm out. Have a nice day.
Without those laws, the price going from $1 per mask to $10 per mask would still be very much affordable for everyone who really needs a mask, and factories who can successfully get decent production underway will earn lots, making it worthwhile to take on the risk of chasing a (possibly short lived) demand.
In practice, I don't think $10/mast is unnaceptable. That is about 15 minutes worth of an ICU nurse's time[0]. In terms of costs that this pandemic is causing, even "expensive" masks are a cheep.
[0] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-IC...
Even the ones we get from 3M South Korea at about $20 each winds up costing just pennies per hour.
Re-use Guidelines: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/ppe-strategy/d...
How have you found reuse to effect fit and performance?
From the CDC page you linked:
"Decontamination of an N95 FFR inactivates viruses and bacteria on the device, but does not restore the N95 FFR to “new” performance. Decontamination studies have evaluated the effect of the decontamination process on the fit and filtration performance of N95 FFRs; however, these studies did not consider the likelihood that N95 FFRs worn by healthcare personnel are likely donned and doffed multiple times before undergoing decontamination. N95 FFR performance will decrease as the number of hours and number of donnings and doffings increase. Repeated decontamination and handling of FFRs can damage the fit and filtration performance of N95 FFRs. Fit performance during limited reuse, including decontaminated FFRs, should be monitored by the respiratory protection program manager or appropriate safety personnel. Information about how to assess N95 FFR fit during limited reuse can be found below...."
We store them in paper bags to let them dry out.
Given we rarely actually have to go out of our home offices, it works well. 20 resperatore lasts about three months per person.
If you need more - you can get 3M N95 from South Korea - about $200 for twenty.
Let’s say it takes 5 years to recoup that initial investment to procure materials and manufacture masks at current pricing. Most experts agree the pandemic will have run its course within a year or two. So common sense says getting into the mask business where it will take 5 years to recoup your losses is a bad bet.
But if pricing was allowed to follow demand, there is more incentive for aspiring mask manufacturers to take those risks. Maybe the cost to ramp up production can be covered in a couple of years or maybe even a couple of months. That mitigates risk and given opportunity like that, existing mask manufacturers will be better incentivized to scale their production more rapidly. And then more masks get produced quickly, scarcity decreases, and pricing eventually finds equilibrium again.
But because we don’t allow “gouging” (whether for legal or social reasons), the mask shortage will continue until existing manufacturers can produce enough to meet demand. And some people that need PPE won’t have it easily available until then, but we will feel awfully good about making sure nobody got gouged. After all, nobody gets gouged if there is nothing to buy.
Yes, obviously - what did you think deficit spending was? But the point is the cost of fiscal expenditure is lower than it has been in the past, and it seems like we have a really useful thing we could be spending it on.
To me, it seems like normal "propensity to consume + ability to pay" style distribution of masks won't help that much in a pandemic that disproportionately spreads among the poor and where the more people wearing the mask, the better.
As Friedman famously asked - who are the angels that are supposed to make these wise, unbiased decisions on our behalf?
Ah yes, as opposed to the rational private market of large capital investments to create new industries, which is apolitical and has no cronyism /s (never mind no price incentive to massively invest in large-scale manufacturing for a temporary pandemic)
I do not think it even remotely holds in the illiquid limit of massive-scale private capital investment markets. I would rather that power be wielded by actors exercising public power shaped by institutional constraints than by private actors who can wield it in an arbitrary manner, particularly in the context of a pandemic where there is a huge societal difference between 10 $10 masks and 100 $1 ones.
Governments that are democratically accountable to the people are far more likely to create outcomes that support collective social needs than are business owners who are accountable to no one.
The fact that the United States does such a poor job of this is an indictment of poor governance, and lack of democratic accountability, than a weakness of the principle of government in general. Other countries do far better at this--note the universal availability of rated masks in places like Korea and Japan from day one of the pandemic--and there is a reason the US is ranked 22nd, and falling, for public corruption.[0]
Artificially cheap prices also encourage hoarding and opportunistic buying by those willing to sell on the black market. And that just compounds the problem.
So while your desire to prevent gouging is admirable, it is also counterproductive.
Are you citing any data for this or are you just assuming this will happen? In my experience when production equals demand everyone continues selling at the ridiculously high prices for months. In a pandemic like this one that's months of watching the death toll climb.
There is a very real cost of sticking to a free market ideology when people are dying.
And to address your alarmism: if people are dying, it's safe to assume that a lack of PPE contributes to that. And people don't have PPE because the free market isn't being allowed to produce it. That's the point.
I'm not the one "sticking" to an ideology.
[EDIT] To be more specific here. Price gouging laws apply to retailers, not manufacturers. Price gouging basically covers retailers hording supply to artificially inflate the price during an emergency. That's not what's going on here. Manufacturers don't have capacity to meet demand. They are free to adjust the price in response.
That can cut both ways: the possibility of "price gouging" can also encourage speculation, both for those hoping to turn a profit and for those who over-buy compared to expected use to ensure price stability.
Our local grocery chain had a quota on milk (for good reason) and the amount of fights and nearly brawls over it were amazing, despite being a need for some families and not others (it's inconvenient to me to not have cereal, it's a big deal for someone with young kids to not have milk) and generally reasonable limits (up to 2 gallons, more than enough for cereal/coffee/baking).
People go to crazy limits to evade the quotas (visiting multiple stores, making multiple purchases in the same trip, etc) and often times they do simply because the quota exists - how many people actually buy more than 2 gallons of milk normally?
TLDR, people are dumb fearful animals and that can cause quotas to backfire in a way that price controls don't (but they have other downsides).
That's not true, you just have to design them properly. For instance: 3M knows its customers, and can decide give retail hardware stores an N95 quota of zero and hospital systems large quotas, roughly based on need. Those organizations aren't going to get into slap fights in an aisle.
> Our local grocery chain had a quota on milk (for good reason) and the amount of fights and nearly brawls over it were amazing
An unsourced anecdote about a failure of an unspecified retail quota system is not good evidence against emergency quotas in general. It might not even be accurate.
> People go to crazy limits to evade the quotas (visiting multiple stores, making multiple purchases in the same trip, etc) and often times they do simply because the quota exists - how many people actually buy more than 2 gallons of milk normally?
IMHO, the main goal of loosely-enforced retail quotas like those is not so much to strictly limit people to the quota, but to increase friction to frustrate hoarders and profiteers.
See, this is a problem. Idiots/scalpers/resellers/paranoids raiding hardware stores for masks is terrible, but construction was considered an essential business country-wide and never halted meaning you still had minimum wage day laborers (not to mention unionized construction workers making well over that) working in environments N95 masks were designed for that had no access to PPE but still needed to report for work because they need to put food on the table and don’t legally qualify for unemployment (since the jobs are there and they’re not being fired/laid off).
IMHO, most N95s on retail shelves probably wouldn't have gone to construction workers anyway; they'd have been snatched up by consumers with no real need. I do think it would have been reasonable allocate a quota to to go to construction supply companies that weren't open to the general public, though, for precisely the reasons you outlined.
This story is pretty interesting, construction workers/companies are having to make similar kinds of adaptations to the shortage as healthcare workers are:
https://www.inquirer.com/real-estate/coronavirus-constructio...
> To combat supply shortages, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has temporarily adjusted some of its requirements for both health-care and construction workers, including allowing them to wear N95 respirator masks for longer than their intended use — normally a day or two for construction workers — and to use other types of respirators, such as KN95s shipped from China....
> OSHA is advising employers to reduce the need for N95 masks at jobsites any way they can, a Department of Labor spokesperson said. The National Association of Home Builders advises those who can’t find masks to minimize dust by vacuuming and wet cutting.
The article even talked about construction companies and unions donating their existing mask stockpiles.
We certainly do. At least six gallons at a time, because my time is money (and mostly because grocery shopping is a chore) and I don’t want to make repeated trips to the grocery store when I don’t have to. I calculate the consumption rate for adults, babies, and toddlers in the house and based off the expiration date and my own experimental findings (based largely off of fridge temperature and brand of milk as a proxy for homogenization method/temperature/duration) I get the maximum I can without it spoiling, which happened just once due to a bad batch that must have been stored wrong in shipping because it spoiled before even the sell by date.
Capitalism isn't effective at distributing by need, only by ability to pay.
Nailed it. Yep. Building a massive production line with complex equipment and training only to be bankrupt in 6 months is a fools errand. The is why we have a government - when we need something that capitalism cannot supply. But they wont, so we don't.
Not if they can make all of their money back in 6 months via extreme prices. However we are past the "extreme prices" phase of the pandemic.
> Not if they can make all of their money back in 6 months via extreme prices. However we are past the "extreme prices" phase of the pandemic.
But to do that, you'd have to bring the new production capacity online on day 1, which is unrealistic. The timelines just don't make sense. New factories don't just pop into existence; it take time to build them and bring them online.
The main thing that would actually happen if price gouging was allowed is that parasitic middlemen would drive up the prices of existing stock by flipping it (making only a personal profit and doing no social good). Existing manufacturers might do that too, if they're not concerned with losing goodwill by pissing off their current customers.
In this case, government is actually preventing capitalism from being tried. But you see that as capitalism has failed and only government can save us.
teachers and many essential workers who need masks the most are also most vulnerable to unexpected expenses like PPE costs. and the organizations they work for typically have strict budges and can usually only provide limited supplies.
that statement feels wildly out of touch.
My district had to double its busing budget this year due to restrictions on the number of students that could be on each bus. This led to even further cuts into the classroom budgets.
So, I guess your experience may be different.
Except, they aren’t spending that much now because they aren’t bringing the kids to school. Why would the teachers need masks?
My district is bringing half the students to school each day, with a different half on different days. But they still drive the buses the same distance, and still need the same number of drivers.
We have made other mandated changes which have been vastly more expensive.
Friend owns a textile factory in India. They immediately began production of masks, which they sold at something like a 10,000% premium. (Re-tooling is expensive, so their profits weren’t exorbitant. Though they were larger than normal, which incentivises the work.) Once the premium diminished, they went back to making clothes.
India has anti-gouging laws. But they are loosely enforced to the point of non-existence. In America, we not only have such laws, we also have a media circus and cancel subculture that strongly discourages such responses.
Case in point: there was a great piece a while back about a domestic mask manufacturer who ramped up production for the H1N1 outbreak only to see demand collapse when the pandemic turned out to be far less severe than expected [1]. They almost went out of business because there was no where to sell their masks at a profit and had to unwind most of their operations.
The solution here is for the federal government to backstop the orders. If no buyer can be found at price $x / mask, then the government will buy them and put them into the national stockpiles for the future.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/surreal-frenzy-inside-us-biggest...
While theoretically price gauging is an incentive to increase production, if that's all you're thinking about, you're dealing with a toy model that has little connection to the real world. Toy models can be super compelling and elegant, but that doesn't make them reality. You have to deal with other factors, like
* The influence of parasitic middlemen only looking to flip goods and drive up the price for quick personal profit. In most of these cases, the period of increased demand is so short this is the only effect you'll see, since there's no time to bring new capacity online, but you have all the downsides of increased prices.
* Does price gouging actually direct the scarce resource to where it's needed? Markets often are very irrational, so this can't reasonably be assumed (e.g. during a famine, the market would direct food to the rich and well-fed even if they just were going to waste it on opulent banquets, because they have the money to pay the price).
* People are actually motivated by things other than greed, even though models of behavior are simplified by assuming greed is their only (or main) motivation.
* New production will come online to meet demand, even without price gouging. How much more production would price gouging motivate? Is that production worth the social cost?
* You can't build a sustainable greed-motivated business on building factories to price-gouge. A brand new market entrant is likely to have a pretty poor product compared to established players, and will likely go bankrupt once demand returns to normal. They might not even get their product out the door in time to take advantage of the high prices. It could be a predictable case of "buy high, sell low."
* New techniques will be developed to more efficiently use current production, which may pull the rug out from under anyone who made a heavy capital investment based on the surge demand.
* Etc.
> Without those laws, the price going from $1 per mask to $10 per mask would still be very much affordable for everyone who really needs a mask, and factories who can successfully get decent production underway will earn lots, making it worthwhile to take on the risk of chasing a (possibly short lived) demand.
IIRC, the price gougers drive up the price even higher than $10.
What i've just said obviously over-simplifies and in some large respects does a dis-service to capitalism BUT i still can't help but feel we need an improvement. It's not good enough yet.
Despite a lack of DPA measures and the existence of anti-price gouging laws, masks remain readily available. For example, asimpleshop.com (made by a fellow HN user) has masks ready for a reasonable price. The fact that everyone does not have access to good KN95 masks comes from a national lack of will, not a lack of national resources.
If you’re not a reliable partner how can you expect people to invest? If someone builds a factory in the US, as soon as masks are available from China again the administration will just drop them like a rock and start ordering from China for rock bottom prices again.
He said he wasn't expanding or making his people pull overtime only for hospitals to go to China.
How much was the cost difference? 10 cents versus 4 cents per mask.
You also might pay $5 for a hot dog at a stadium when you can buy them for $1 outside, so there's that.
Is that why the concession sales at the stadiums are hurting?
NYC had street vendors selling legitimate masks bought for example via supplier that normally would be selling to Home Depot, except home depot decided to do its patriotic duty ( i was amazed when they announced it ) and stopped selling N95 masks all together.
For example this is the stuff from a qualified vendor today:
https://nypost.com/2020/09/12/principals-rip-nyc-doe-for-sup...
If there was accountability and an actual, real probability of collecting on judgements internationally, I'd have no problem with globalization. The reality is unless you are a deep-pocketed (absolute minimum 7th exponent club) actor, odds of actually getting all the way through the other side of collections are less than slim. It's still bad odds when sourcing with an "isolationist" bias, but you can knock a couple exponents off, and I'll take order of magnitude differentials all day long.
If there was a way to secure non-gamed reviews, then I'd be much more open to globalization-produced goods, but I haven't found that yet. My current rough proxy for quality is to source commercial-rated duty cycle goods if they are available, research on trades discussion forums for discussion about the manufacturer, and work up an evaluation from there. But that's really time-consuming. No way do I now "trust the market" to shake out shady players.
If you want to "save money", then go ask the Chinese factories to sell you the masks now.
Here's the link:
> This is a cycle familiar to Bowen. During what he calls "peacetime," when there are no outbreaks, there are few buyers of masks. During an epidemic, there's suddenly limitless demand.
> "Imagine if, all at once, millions of people wanted to skateboard," Bowen says. "The skateboarding industry is not set up for spikes like that, and neither is the mask-making industry."
> Prestige Ameritech, for example, owns a limited number of machines that assemble, sew and shape the masks. A decade ago, it ramped up production in response to the swine flu outbreak by buying more machines and hiring 150 new workers.
> "We made a really big mistake," Bowen says of that decision. It took about four months to build the new machines, which are as long as a school bus and cost as much as $1 million.
> By the time they were ready, the swine flu crisis had ended, demand vaporized, and Prestige Ameritech almost went bankrupt. "One day — and it is literally almost like one day — it just quits. The demand is over, the phones stop ringing," Bowen says.
> To make matters worse, the hospitals and medical supply companies suddenly had a glut of masks; they stopped buying for months.
If I promise to buy a car from you for $100,000, and you spend $10,000 to make it, and I discover I don't need the car anymore, in most cases, I can walk away paying you $10,000. If you continued doing unneeded work, that'd be bad economics. If you could rake me over the coals and ask to me to pay $50k, that'd be exploitative. In most cases, the outcome of a broken contract is that I try to set things right for you by either:
* Paying you costs incurred
* Paying you expected profits
* Or similar.
Courts calculate damages by a range of formulas, which then sets standards for how business is conducted, and in most cases, people don't go to court but just agree to pay damages.
This is foreign to how most people think about agreements; it's a very different culture. But if you talk to lawyers or executives, that's how they reason about contracts.
In the case with Phillips, they already delivered 1/4th of the ventilators, there are reports all over the place stating that these were overpaid for. Of course the government overpaid for these. They were in a situation were they had to. Phillips even made indications in their earnings reports that these are contributing significant profit.
These manufacturers would not hesitate to enter one of these contracts again in the future.
Someone should investigate how it came to be that anesthetizing COVID-19 patients and sticking a tube into their lungs was the standard treatment, until the front-line medical teams rebelled. [1]
[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/Ventilators-aren-t-a-pan...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...
Second, contrary to the pro-price-gouging argument, the real issue is risk aversion: nobody will sign the long term contracts required for manufacturers to justify the investment (and, by the way, are functionally the same as a higher price). Why? Because providers in places where shortages actually manifest - largely poor & rural areas - are nearly bankrupt anyway. They can't guarantee payment for sh*t in the long term.
Ultimately, this issue is exactly the type of thing we need collective action for: pool our resources & buy together to defray long-term costs. Bluntly, the government should be guaranteeing these contracts. But they don't AFAIK - and that's the failing.
What are the most useful bits of PPE against an airborne (breathed, not sneezed/touched) virus?
Others are still useful (gowns, faceshields, sanitizer, etc.), but masks are the most useful, from what I can tell.
KN95 masks are the Chinese regulatory standard vs N95 which is the NIOSH standard, but KN95 sales in the US still need FDA approval.
Here is a list of approved masks from the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-disease-2019...
Only for use in healthcare settings. The FDA doesn't have regulatory authority over masks and respirators for non-medical uses.
> KN95 masks are the Chinese regulatory standard vs N95 which is the NIOSH standard, but KN95 sales in the US still need FDA approval.
We bought two brands of KN95s from Taobao, and I've found they don't fit my caucasian face very well. The bend strip around the nose is too short to get a good seal.
This was earlier in the pandemic, and I believe they were off-brand ones, so they might be lower quality than others. We definitely didn't pay that much. I only consider them a marginal improvement over a surgical mask.
† No moral qualms here because there was no insane shortage in February, because it was not for myself or for personal/corporate profit, and because it wasn’t more than we could need in a worst case scenario which absolutely materialized (reopening school in a pandemic); imho it’s not unlike a governor who placed a large order for their state - for which they would be praised as prescient and not shot down as hoarding.
With the right declaration, the feds can make any American company manufacture anything. Why haven't they used it for N95's?
> Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of
> Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest,
> a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The
> political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to
> Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be
> an effective political strategy,” said the expert.[0]
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-s...
Speaking of 3M and N95's, can anybody with some unbiased knowledge explain what exactly is the chinese manufactured 'KN95' mask?
Are they just conveniently using the name or are the KN95 masks made to standard, to be P2/N95 grade masks?
There's a good comparison chart on page 2 of https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1791500O/comparison-ffp2....
https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1791500O/comparison-ffp2...
https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1791500O/comparison-ffp2...
Edit: there's at least "zoom" available as well. I think it takes a percentage value as parameter.
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/whats-the-difference-bet...
One thing perhaps to be concerned about (either way) is differences in the enforcement of the standard, but I don't have any solid info on that.
Would need a true price, i.e. what do you have to pay if you have no "special powers" like a hospital. Spot as close as is reasonable, maybe with 1 week delivery; I am assuming that the forward curve is still in backwardation. That would be the best tracker of shortage. The curve itself would be interesting, if it ever flips to contango without spot going meaningfully down that'd mean serious problems (nobody expects capacity increase).
Or they just pretend to wear it, by only covering their mouth, and leaving their noses exposed.
Regardless, this issue does not fix stupidity.
They are relatively easy to manufacture, but what we really needed was mass-production of N95/KN95 masks for essential workers.
Pay ten bucks per mask - and soon enough in every basement there will be a masks factory.
At least until OSHA comes after them.
These masks are disposable. They should be disposed of properly, but throwing them away isn't the cause of supply problems.
Thus, the maximum length of continuous use in non-dusty healthcare workplaces is typically dictated by hygienic concerns (e.g., the respirator was discarded because it became contaminated) or practical considerations (e.g., need to use the restroom, meal breaks, etc.), rather than a pre-determined number of hours.
Extended use alone is unlikely to degrade respiratory protection.
If no manufacturer guidance is available, preliminary data(19, 20) suggests limiting the number of reuses to no more than five uses per device to ensure an adequate safety margin.
The most significant risk is of contact transmission from touching the surface of the contaminated respirator.
Basically, the major risk factors for extended use and reuse is contamination of the respirator resulting in infection from handling it and damage rendering the respirator inferior (e.g. due to improper seal). Also, these guidelines are for clinical settings where these specific risk factors significantly elevated. For a normal person who uses the mask maybe once per week (assuming they are rotating), a single n95 mask could last quite a long time.
> Extended use refers to the practice of wearing the same N95 respirator for repeated close contact encounters with several patients, without removing the respirator between patient encounters.
You're reading it as "extended use" meaning multi-day use, but that's not what the article defines it as. You will eventually have to discard the thing as it gets soiled or becomes harder to breathe through as it collects particles.
If you read the linked papers, the reuse guidance is over the course of days with rest periods in between.
Also, you don't usually find N95 masks littering the streets. These are usually just surgical or cloth masks, and they are not really worth reusing.
This article is about N95 masks, which are mostly used by doctors and nurses.