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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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

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

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

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