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Comment by quasse | Hacker News Reader

I can confirm the "used PPE" thing from personal experience. My partner (a nurse at a VA hospital) was given a Tupperware container with holes poked in the lid as "overnight storage" for her N95 mask and was asked to reuse it for up to a month at a time. As far as I know this is still ongoing.

I know the cynical take is "you need to stop letting yourself be surprised / disappointed by this kind of thing" but we should be able to do better, especially in a federally run hospital in the USA.

My coworkers from mainland China were concerned about our well-being and started shipping us KN95 masks, even fairly early on in the pandemic. feelsbadman.jpg

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I can also confirm as a student doctor we've had "used" N95s for weeks at a time (that we might not even be sized for). Often being chastised for using an N95 instead of a surgical mask in efforts to "save PPE". It's difficult as a student seeing patients with covid daily as we're given even less than staff. Some students even offered to buy their own PPE but we're not allowed to use outside equipment. So, here I am with my surgical mask seeing patients that possibly have covid but haven't been swabbed yet until I take a history.

Edit: Similarly to your partner, we are given paper bags for our face shields and kidney bean shaped plastic bins to hold our N95. They installed coat hooks to hang our masks at the end of a shift.

Was the Defense Production Act successful at ramping up production of PPE? It's been 8 months since I've seen a proper N95 mask on store shelves. Hearing that someone close was going through the same thing as your partner, bringing home used masks and having to hit the black market/eBay for respirators with cartridges so they wouldn't become lightheaded when transporting patients all day was shocking. I think what's even more sad is how few tech companies opened their hearts, wallets, innovations, or resources to tackling this PPE situation.

The DPA was not employed to ramp up production of PPE.

We used it for ventilators, which we later found out we wouldn't need because they usually do more harm than good.

It wasn't used for PPE, just ventilators.

> It wasn't used for PPE, just ventilators.

And meat packing.

My understanding from earlier reading of HN was that it takes months (closer to 1 year than 1 month from what I remember) to standup a new production line for N95 masks. With the supply chain constraints & presumable demand for such things that could possibly take even longer to set up, I think it is understandable that we haven't seen an increased supply on store shelves.

I just don’t see how this can be the reality that we’re living in. These things were $1/per at retail before the pandemic. People are ready to pay many multiples ($10/day? Sure. $20/day? Yeah) of that now, how are the economic incentives not aligned to make these things be extremely common and easy for everyone to buy.

This is where the fine print in economics comes in, things will eventually be balanced by the invisible hand but that's only in the long-term. In the short-term an untold amount of human suffering can occur.

Economics doesn't solve for reduced human misery. To avoid this we would have needed adequate central plans for this event (or rather, a set of people that decided to fund the plans we did have).

That is a massive hole that is often looked over by many. Oh, the market will take care of it. When? After we're all dying from pollution or missing fingers from faulty equipment? How can you in good faith believe the market will take care of everything?

I don't know enough about material science / manufacturing engineering. Obviously, the specific item being talked about here matters. If this was a purely aesthetic item that is trendy the QC matters a lot less. I would assume companies don't want to rush a new line and then be sending out masks with defects - send that to a few hospitals and your business will be done.

As an outsider this is basically exactly what I would expect to happen in US healthcare.

As an American, it has been incredibly demoralizing seeing one institution after another fail miserably. I didn’t have high expectations, but oh boy did we fall way short.

CDC was muzzled by Trump admin. and a lot of that cascaded downwards.

But still, horrible to see.

Not sure why you're being downvoted (other than by angry Trump supporters). This is a factually true statement.

Muzzled, what an apt term in this situation

"Americans will always do the right thing - after exhausting all the alternatives."

-- Churchill

3 vaccines in record time.. I know J&J is still pending. I want the Healthcare/CDC/FDA pipeline to be improved.. Without American ingenuity the world is a much bleaker place.

You realize Russia and China had ones quicker?

I never claimed US was fastest in spite of my skepticism about Russia and China, but it's the US vaccines that would get wide spread use in ending this pandemic.

3 is a good number and perhaps more will come from USA.

The Pfizer vaccine was developed in Germany. The Oxford vaccine was developed in the UK. Of the approved vaccines, only the Moderna vaccine was developed in the US (and it's actually being manufactured in Switzerland). The J&J vaccine is being developed in Belgium.

That's not to say that the US hasn't been playing important roles, both now and in the research that enabled this. But "without American ingenuity" we'd be using vaccines from several other countries (including several more that are currently in development, as well as China and Russia, who have approved vaccines already in use).

Did you get vaccinated?

I will, as soon as I can. As a healthy middle aged person I'm not high up on the list.

That’s completely unrelated to the question at hand. Your assertion was that American ingenuity brought us three vaccines, which was demonstrably disproven.

If you want to make the point “but we’ll do a great job distributing it”, an argument I’m not feeling positive about, then make that argument explicitly.

Especially since I (the general public) can get an N95 online. If companies aren't protecting their workers they're not trying hard enough.

Where can it be bought from a reputable/reliable retailer? I’d love a link.

Not the person you asked, but these are the ones I've been buying from Amazon for the past two months: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08CGZFSZ9

I've cut one open out of every box I've ordered, and so far they've all been legitimate, 5-layer masks. Actual 3M masks are still impossible to find, but I've been happy enough with these.

Not to discount that product at all, I’ve got no experience judging those things.

But Amazon is not a reputable retailer. there’s no way for the end user of this to validate its effectiveness so that’s why I’d prefer at least a retailer who’s merchant had to sign off and order a product vs a completely unknown company selling through Amazon.

I guess this is where we are when all our institutions fail us collectively.

I don't blame you one bit. I'm not happy about feeling I genuinely need to destructively test one of the filters in every box, believe me. I am just reporting that so far, this particular listing has proven to be the real deal. It could also change tomorrow, and Amazon wouldn't update the listing.

It's not a supply issue.

The way certain emergency regulations are written, if you don't have enough gear, you can reuse. If you have enough gear, you cannot. It's normal, awful business practices in hospitals.

There's a lot of counterfeit product in the supply chain at the moment so that "N95" may well not meet many of the required standards.

It blows my mind that these supply issues are happening in CA of all places. Where I can go to Koreatown in LA and buy 10 kn95s for $10 from about a dozen stores.

> My coworkers from mainland China were concerned about our well-being and started shipping us KN95 masks

My partner’s friend with family in China did the same thing for us. His dad was getting chemo and they had their family send a couple boxes of KN95s over to help protect him. Depressing, given how much America looks like a failed state relative to the two countries pandemic response, but good that interpersonal relationships trump all the BS “new Cold War” rhetoric.

The reason we don’t have masks is because we’ve gone all in on China and lost our manufacturing base. If you think this happened in the past 3 years, you have to ignore all data and pretend history doesn’t exist.

Yes, it's not like I have any connection via heritage or anything either, but our Chinese friends and coworkers have been extremely kind to us. They seem mystified / embarrassed to ask about the way our country is managing.

You can just order KN95s quite easily in the United States and have been able to for a long time, and actually I have for personal use (especially during the CA fires), and they have almost identical nominal requirements to N95, but:

https://www.ecri.org/press/up-to-70-of-chinese-kn95-masks-te...

> a federally run hospital

I mean, of course it's going to be a hellhole.

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