Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Capacity is ramping up. It's surprising that the reporter (Joel Rose) didn't mention a new large Dräger plant in Pennsylvania that has begun manufacturing completely made-in-USA N-95 NIOSH-compliant masks.

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 government should have stepped in. We probably don't even need more N95. We could have a different kind of mask that is highly effective and made for comfort with kids and adult sizes. The government could have ordered and distributed these at cost. Then a national mask mandate is trivial. We could have greatly cut the spread and job losses. Instead they did basically nothing and said it would go away in a week or two.

We is any governments. There is a worldwide shortage, not US shortage.

This actually happened in Korea - the KF94 masks have great surface area, seal, comfort etc. Good surface area = good airflow as well.

Korea has a nice new mask. AirQueen. Reusable. Reasonably comfortable. N95-equivalent for filtration.

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.

I ordered some of these and was very impressed with the quality.

Be careful with AirQueen masks. They are of dubious quality.

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?

Proper fit (read: the seal) is necessary for an N95 mask to do its job. So much so that 3M put out a bulletin for US customers cautioning them that fit testing is required when using KN95 masks, even if you are already fit-tested for their N95s, because the KN95 masks are designed for a flatter Asian-featured face.

N95 would have been good if ready on day one, to avoid lockdowns

after that any mask would help with appropriate behavior, which requires nothing but political quality

The US government did step in - really early on, soon after Covid-19's existence became known, they guaranteed that they'd buy up the production of N95 masks if no-one else did in order to encourage companies to risk producing more of them even though Covid might not turn out to be a big deal. Generally, the only acknowledgement you see of this in the media is in the form of complaints that they didn't guarantee to buy up production for even longer.

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.

> 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.

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/...

The US government did direct where the existing production went. Remember all the stories claiming that they were starving blue states of PPE for political reasons every time those states got less than they ordered? Similarly, they cracked down quite heavily on people hoarding and reselling N95 masks, which created another wave of headlines about how terrible it was that the states which were trying to buy those face masks at inflated prices didn't get their orders.

> The US government did direct where the existing production went.

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...

> when the demand may not exist a year from now.

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.

You seem to misunderstand human instinct - we’ll do exactly what you’re saying won’t happen.

State & federal gov'ts should stockpile masks against the next emergency. This would guarantee a pretty good demand for product for a while.

masks (and lockdowns) are safety theater, for the benefit of seeming like good, caring citizens because of the high visibility of wearing a mask, when the hard work of preventing spread comes down to distancing properly even when that’s socially awkward, like at a gathering which is where mask usage also dives, because it’s private and the humans involved are overly trusting and complicit.

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.

You're right there's some deep tribal instinct. And masks scratch that itch big time. Strap the tribe sign right to your face!

> masks are a distraction at best

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/

do you live in a hospital? because if not, those studies are of very limited utility to you, proving only that masks can possibly lower spread in a highly controlled environment, with no more than a suggestive hypothesis in any other scenario.

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 think everything you've brought up here is addressed in the second link I provided.

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.

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