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mensetmanusman

Instead of talking about risk compensation, talk about why we have no long term planning in this area.

We could have had a decades worth of n95 stockpiling for less than the cost of one tank for every living American.

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We did have a pandemic response team and excellent preparedness but the team was disbanded under our last president.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

And did what with the stockpile of enough n95 masks for every citizen? Threw them all away?

Point is, just because at one point there existed a team called the "pandemic response team", doesn't mean we were at all prepared in the way that GP is suggesting, or even that they would have helped at all

All medical equipment has expiration dates, including masks. It's possible that a lot was thrown away instead of replaced once the pandemic response team was disbanded.

I trust a 10 years expired N95 mask that isn't moldy considering how most masks people wear are basically trash

In this case, an expired stockpile is better than no stockpile (and close to as good as an unexpired stockpile). Those expired masks could have saved a lot of lives.

Expired stock would have been thrown away every year from 2017 until March 2020 and most likely would have been legally required since it is medical equipment. That is a consequence of cutting funds for future disasters.

You’re literally pretending that the had an n95 mask for every citizen before that team was dissolved. That is a fairytale.

I bet the first thing that goes in an n95 mask is actually the rubber for the headband.

N95's have been shown to last longer than 10 years.

There’s a publicly available playbook that lists in excruciating detail all the steps that should be taken.

In fact, for the most part, they include the steps that were taken, except if they were followed as in the playbook they would have been taken a lot earlier.

Edit: Here, I found a link for you:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6819268/Pandemic-Play...

The N95 mask stockpile was emptied under Obama though, despite recommendations to replenish it.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/03/fac...

It was emptied due to the swine flu response in 2009-10. The Obama administration included funding to replenish it in the 2011 budget, but that was rejected by Congress.

In Canada, the Ontario Chief Medical Officer said not to worry because we had learned many lessons from SARS1.

Then our medical staff promptly ran out of PPE in the first few weeks, especially n95 masks, just like we did with SARS.

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