American mask makers are going out of business | Hacker News Reader

American mask makers are going out of business

nytimes.com

95 pointsprostoalex147 comments

There wasn't so many mask makers in China before Covid. And after Covid there won't be as many either - in fact, they're just going to shrug it off and make something else by then.

People are talking about Shenzhen electronics all the time. It's that impressive because the supply chains are there.

Yiwu, the Shenzhen counterpart for everything else is less mentioned: no matter its masks, toys, clothes, furniture, or MAGA hats, or Ukrainian flags (or Donetsk flags, or even RoC flags, they don't care), they make EVERYTHING and it's the place the world put orders to. It's the kitchen sink of the light industry, so that companies stay afloat instead of making masks for life.

You say that but those people not "making masks for life" controlled 90% of the mask market in the US. Who cares how they did it, the main issue is the fact this country is unwilling to build up local supply chains because they're too busy giving themselves fat bonuses by cutting costs while jacking up hospital bills on patients (speaking of the hospital admins who are responsible for this sort of thing) and no one in government or anyone else is going to stop them.

> Who cares how they did it

Isn’t that sort of the whole question?

> the main issue is the fact this country is unwilling to build up local supply chains

We don’t have a command economy. It also doesn’t make much sense to pay prevailing US wages to produce masks that sell for $0.50 per unit, you would need incredible scale to make that work, you’d need to be 3M, who does make them.

> because they're too busy giving themselves fat bonuses by cutting costs while jacking up hospital bills on patients

What? People who run hospitals are unlikely to every be involved in manufacturing anything, it’s a totally different kind of business.

I’m not sure what you’re arguing here.

> It also doesn’t make much sense to pay prevailing US wages to produce masks that sell for $0.50 per unit

One could argue that there's an inherent ethical issue at play if the country needs masks priced at $0.50 per unit, but can't manufacture them itself while paying wages that it considers fair.

You could make an argument like that for almost any good. The truth is that comparative advantages matter and its simple impractical to manufacture or claw out of the ground every thing people in a given country might want. Cheap masks are a great thing in a pandemic. We could have simply been maintaining the stockpile that the government had for just such a purpose.

More simply put, Americans demand much higher wages than would make such a cheap mask possible. The cheaper a thing like a surgical mask is, the easier it is to use a fresh one every time you need one.

Do you think Chinese workers who make those masks wouldn't prefer to get paid the American salary for that job? Everybody demands higher wages. The point is that some get the high wages, and some get to produce the cheap goods that make those wages effectively even higher. It's not about any kind of skilful or technological or natural "competitive advantage" - humans are the same everywhere! - it's about how much any given country is willing to abuse its workforce, and how much other countries are willing to look away while benefitting from it.

> t's not about any kind of skilful or technological or natural "competitive advantage" - humans are the same everywhere! - it's about how much any given country is willing to abuse its workforce

This is a terribly myopic view of the world. Having a much lower cost of living or relative stage of economic development is a competitive advantage in manufacturing low cost goods that require a lot of human input. Those wages can be and often are pretty good relative to local alternatives. Low skill, low cost manufacturing is usually a stepping stone in economic from subsistence agriculture to a more advanced economy. The conditions don't necessarily have to be bad, and are quite a bit better than a lot of agricultural work.

Having lot's of people moving from farms to cities is a competitive advantage in low cost manufacturing. We're already seeing China moving aways from some of these types of manufacturing as their economy advances. Neighboring states are using this shift to try and shift their economies away from subsistence agriculture as well.

It's fine to lobby for better working conditions, especially in trade deals, but we shouldn't deny people in other parts of the world the opportunity to move from agriculture, to light manufacturing, to more advanced economic activity.

If those conditions are "not bad", then why do we have borders and work visas? Let's be honest here: if the labor market was truly free across the globe, with no borders in place, most of those workers in countries where manufacturing has been outsourced to, would have moved to US and other Western countries. And the reason for that is primarily not political, but economical - Westerners get paid more (in terms of purchasing power as it translates to quality of life) for doing the same job. It doesn't matter how you move pieces around on this board, it boils down to the same thing: the West keeps its standard of living by outsourcing work that's "too expensive" to perform under that standard elsewhere.

This is a deeply myopic and zero sum view of trade. Moving low tech manufacturing to Asia has lifted a billion people out of grinding rural deprivation across multiple nations.

Western nations are wealthy because the West, broadly, won WWII and the Cold War while spending the post war period building high tech industry. The US in particular started industrialization as a low cost manufacturing center. Other nation deserve a chance to follow the same path to prosperity.

The US wasn't a command economy in the great depression yet somehow survived. Nice strawman argument.

Also it's like you didn't read the article (likely didn't) that explicitly mentioned hospital admins cutting costs (the article says they're hooked on cheaper goods "like crack"), otherwise you would have seen the connection.

I read the article and I'm pretty familiar with the economics of healthcare. I spent years working on projects to shift away from fee for service to value based care. My point was that hospital administrators have nothing to do with manufacturing. The people behind hospital consolidation and some of the self defeating cost cutting measures aren't responsible for there not being a supply chain starting from specialized Canadian wood pulp, to machines that make fibers and materials, all the way to finished masks. If domestic manufacturers could innovate and deliver a better/cheaper product people would buy it.

It's ridiculous to think that we should have to manufacture every single important product domestically even if there are better opportunities for economically for firms and workers. We specialize for a lot of good reasons.

The article has a really naive view of economics and takes an uninformed protectionist stance.

for example:

>To put it another way, the modern imperative of maximizing shareholder value will always put efficiency and cost over resilience.

This means that the firms in question are aren't correctly pricing supply chain risk. Supply shocks will surely destroy a lot of shareholder value. But, paying too much for supplies necessarily means you have less money for things like pay, new equipment, etc.

Even for goods 100% made in the US from US raw materials there were still supply disruptions. If a large percentage of all truckers and loading dock workers are sick with COVID, you still won't have the goods have and where you need them. Goods weren't unavailable simply because they were made abroad, they often were sitting unloaded in containers.

There's more than a century of of economic research around protectionism and it's pretty clear that it doesn't pay off in the way it's proponents suggest. We got fucked on PPE because the stockpiles weren't maintained. The government promised the healthcare industry that ti the event of a Swine Flu like pandemic, that there would be a stockpile that they could draw from. So rationally, hospitals didn't keep their own stockpiles. The government after building up the stockpile initially, just didn't maintain it.

The big problem with the buy American initiatives is that they sound nice, but are in the end just handouts to favored businesses. If you require highway projects to only use American steel for guard rails, you end up with fewer miles of highway for the same amount of money. Trying to tie corporate welfare, jobs programs, and things like infrastructure together in a single initiative is a sure way to do all three badly. We've seen this for decades. And the more domestic producers rely on the government to tip the scales, the less able they are to compete internationally. It's a lose lose, for the false promise of "resiliency".

But masks were commonly worn in public in Asia by people with a cold or flu before covid - they already had a market for masks before the pandemic and manufacturers filling it

Yes but a tiny one.

1 or 2% of the population wearing a mask for a week isn't quite the same as 100% of the population wearing one for years (e.g. in Singapore or Hong Kong).

Not my point - Chinese mask manufacturers had an existing market to fill, they already new how to make them, all they had to do was to scale their manufacture which the govt helped them do because they knew it was important - not so much in the west

Perhaps 4 month for 15% of people, in Japan. It's different scale but not very small.

Capitalism vs. communism I guess ...

you got me confused there for a sec

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, it's just the opposite. — John Kenneth Galbraith

In China it's become semi-standard to wear a mask in the office even after just having a cold. So there's a definite change to something similar to Japan.

The covid tests mailed to me by the US government are made in China. I'm sure the government contracted it to a US supplier who bought the tests from China...but come on . 2 years in and we aren't producing even Covid tests?

Why can't the US government mandate hospitals need to purchase a percentage of their supplies from US manufacturers in order to receive medicaid/Medicare. It can be 10, 20%, low enough to keep costs down by importing the bulk from China, but high enough to maintain a base that can be ramped up.

> Why can't the US government mandate hospitals need to purchase a percentage of their supplies from US manufacturers in order to receive medicaid/Medicare.

Trade agreements most likely.

I would not be surprised if that sort of preferential treatment would count as a subsidy and be actionable under NAFTA (whatever it's called now).

We also have a healthcare cost crisis. It wouldn't just be masks, it would be literally everything the hospital buys, and it would "tie their hands from getting the best price for patients" (I guarantee you a Republican would use a similar line in a campaign if that proposal went through.

There are a number of contributing factors. The lack of manufacturing in the US, which you can blame on bean counters wanting to utilize Chinese slave labor. A tax system that prefers the lower wage workers be either on the dole, work illegally, or work 3 gig-based jobs. A kafkaesque government contracting system dreamed up and continually patched by government workers. The same government workers that would work private sector if they were given a chance. But, they often can't because a lack of experience, aptitude or drive.

Slave labor? Surely the ratio of Chinese laborers who feel enslaved is low enough that it's inappropriate to describe Chinese labor on the whole as slave labor.

Some are literally slaves.

Many are nearly so. Giving people a thin veneer of token but not real freedom and token but not fair salary or decent working conditions doesn't absolve you of abuse.

Raise people in an environment where people learn that how they are being treated is right and make everyone fear dissent and you just won't hear about many peoples feelings from the other side of the world.

Obfuscation is the name of the game in the 21st century, make absolute things grey areas, and add layers of abstraction to the extent that you can't really tell what's being done or whose fault it is so that the same kinds of exploitation can keep going on and it's not so easy to be opposed to it because finding the target is just hard.

Hey, now I understand people who insult people by saying they have savior complex! It’s all about thinking you have agency and other people don’t.

> Many are nearly so. Giving people a thin veneer of token but not real freedom and token but not fair salary or decent working conditions doesn't absolve you of abuse.

“Real freedom”? “Fair salary”? “Decent working conditions”? What makes you think Chinese people can’t make their own choices? They’ve been leaving the countryside nonstop for 70 years. The pay for unskilled labor has been going up pretty much nonstop since Deng opened up. China has a lot bad about it but I doubt you would be pretending Thai people are unthinking automatons and they’re about as rich as Chinese.

> Raise people in an environment where people learn that how they are being treated is right and make everyone fear dissent and you just won't hear about many peoples feelings from the other side of the world.

Indeed. You could make children sit down, shut up and do as they’re told all day five days a week if you just told people it was normal. You could invade and bomb other countries with impunity. You could support other countries in intervening in civil wars to keep them going without end. Good thing we’re free. Good thing we right thinking people would never do anything like that.

That's a whole lot of whataboutism to excuse human rights issues in a brutal and immoral country.

It didn't sound like an excuse to me, but a distinction between slavery and something else. Not all exploitation is slavery.

Go watch American Factory to see what conditions/mentality is like in Chinese factories.

Watching a Netflix documentary is generally not a great way to learn about how the world actually works.

It's a start.

Or just go to any major e-commerce warehouse here in US.

It is not that different when the time you pee is measured and factored in pay

No, I think slavery is significantly different.

It is very different. Go watch the documentary and come back to me.

> The lack of manufacturing in the US

> The United States is the world's third largest manufacturer (after the People's Republic of China and the European Union) with a record high real output in Q1 2018 of $2.00 trillion (i.e., adjusted for inflation in 2009 Dollars) well above the 2007 peak before the Great Recession of $1.95 trillion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St....

From your link: the US made up 28% of manufacturing in 2002, dipped steeply, and then rose back to 18%. That's a huge loss of manufacturing. Especially when you consider that the manufacturing activity in China is, in large part, US companies gutting their own operations to save a buck. The short-sighted, "well educated" Harvard MBA bean counters aren't taught in school what comes next. After they gut and globalized, China steals their IP and floods the market with clones under a dozen shadow brands.

The bean counters got their salaries and bonuses. Why should they care what happens next?

It seems to me that historically the real controls on our business models were social, not regulatory. And with ethics and conscience removed, we've become a society being slowly devoured by a close relative of paper-clip optimizer AIs, running on distributed and fungible human wetware.

It never dropped in absolute terms. It’s been on a constant upward trend. As a proportion of global manufacturing it dropped but that’s inevitable with other economies growing if you’re as big a part of the global economy as the US is.

Tell that to the rust belt.

My understanding is that a lot of the US' manufacturing output is an artifact of how agencies do statistical adjustments for improvements in computer chips.

Huh, it's strange that they'd consider the EU a "single" manufacturer for the purposes of that list.

It's helpful to do that because it provides like-with-like comparisons.

Functionally the EU operates with zero internal customs etc, free movement of people etc. It also represents a population group of a similar size to the US and China.

In the same way, breaking down manufacturing in the US by state, and comparing each state to China is not helpful, so dealing with each European country invidually in the comparison would not be helpful.

Shouldn’t Canada and Mexico be combined with the United States based on those criteria? NAFTA is still a thing.

I thought of that as well. But while there is a mostly free movement of goods, there isn't a free movement of people.

Plus from a motivational point of view adding in Mexico and Canada does nothing for those keen to improve the state of US manufacturing. Inside Europe there would be similar reports comparing the individual countries - and I suspect at the US state level there might be studies as well.

With the free movement of people though internal competition is less beneficial. (although geographic spread is still desirable.)

Part of the issue is that American businesses are not always better. So a requirement of purchasing subpar overpriced products just because they're American-made doesn't help anyone. They need to find ways to create innovative manufacturing in America.

Simple naive economics suggests otherwise. If a 10% domestic requirement keeps demand artificially high, competition will enter the market. New factories, etc. will spring up to get a piece of the fat. They will compete on price, quality, etc.--all the usual points of competition. People will get creative to get their piece of that pie. (Of course some of the creativity will be figuring out ways to subcontract it to China and still count as American.)

I mean you got the naive economics part right. These kinds of contracts are selected based on relationships, not product quality or even business acumen. In your mind the government conducts regular technical product evaluations of every small business that attempts to make masks at scale? That isn’t reality.

They are saying each individual hospital would have to choose a domestic manufacturer for atleast part of their supply. This would cause more domestic manufacturers to start up and compete for each hospitals business. The rule would affect the hospitals directly, not the mask makers.

At a minimum it is a jobs program, and so can be viewed as part of the welfare state (a lot of government spending falls, at least partially, into this category).

Perhaps more importantly, it provides a national strategic interest that is not easily captured through economic analysis. When times are good and international trade happens smoothly this is not important, but when the international market breaks down for some reason, having domestic production gives our government more options in how to respond.

We saw this with covid, when every nation was scrambling critical resources to deal with the public health emergency. We see this now with Russia, who is regretting how dependent they on foreign trade; and in Europe who are regretting how dependent they are on Russian energy.

This ignores the massive levels of subsidies that the Chinese govt provides to their companies.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3167588/c...

Bud, if you think only China is playing the subsidy game, you are sadly mistaken: https://www.forbes.com/sites/taxnotes/2020/11/20/boeings-tax...

Bud, please understand that this is a spectrum and not a binary situation.

Also, Chinese restrictions on companies restrictions on foreign companies pale in comparison to the freedom they enjoy in the US.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/12/28/bbchina-unveils...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/28/enticing-china-market-tricki...

Google, Facebook and Twitter are all banned in mainland China.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/12/chinese-app-that-let-users-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...

Meanwhile, TikTok and the likes are freely allowed to shape our minds.

Blocking foreign companies is a form of massive subsidy.

One reason the software industry in America is so successful is because there is no government license required to write software, and software can be shipped without needing approval from the government, and the government doesn't regulate how the software is written.

Yes, I know if you write software for a medical device, the FDA will have to approve it.

Perhaps because software on its own is unlikely to hurt people, while we have seen plenty of physical products causing deaths and mutilation: Failing car breaks, cellphone batteries catching fire, strollers cutting off fingers, playground structures collapsing and so on. It only takes a few shitty products in a category for regulations to be set up

The USA (and UK) seem to have entirely lost sight of the fact that there are strategic industries, capabilities and products as a result of a blind devotion to the ideology of the "free" market and a belief that globalisation is forever and always and that you'll always be able to buy whatever you need from whomever you want. The requirement to purchase some domestically made products is a hedge against such events as a global pandemic or large scale war. Innovative, high tech, high skill manufacturing is important, but so is boring, non innovative, low margin manufacturing that provides resiliance.

>2 years in and we aren't producing even Covid tests?

It's an error to assume that there are absolutely no COVID tests made in the US simply because the small handful you received wasn't.

For instance, the popular over-the-counter at-home test manufactured by Abbott is made in the US, except for swabs (mix of Thailand and US) due to supply/demand issues.

https://www.globalpointofcare.abbott/en/product-details/bina...

Abbott sells their Binax test in the US for like 5x the price they sell the same test for in Europe, because the FDA was slow to approve other brands of rapid tests and used questionable criteria,† so they had substantial monopoly pricing power while other vendors’ tests were restricted.

If the only way US test production can compete is via predatory price gouging, that’s hardly a sign of health.

†: The criterion was performance vs. PCR test, even though PCR and antigen tests measure different things, so that the vendors who slipped through the regulation were those who best gamed the test studies, while various other vendors with tests that perform nearly identically in practice failed FDA study criterion. The FDA refused to accept a performance comparison of new antigen tests vs. already approved antigen tests.

> It's an error to assume that there are absolutely no COVID tests made in the US simply because the small handful you received wasn't.

It's an error to imply they were making this assumption in the first place. I, too, am baffled that two years into a pandemic, any tests are coming from China. Didn't the whole thing _start_ there?

Why would one not want to get tests for a disease from the place where the disease started?

It's more what it says about our government's utter incompetence. If we can't solve the problem of distributing masks in an arguably _light_ pandemic, what the hell should we expect when a worse one comes along...?

Global supply chain issues have clearly stuck around, and we're relying on another country on another continent to provide something that would classify as an emergency good. You tell me how that makes sense.

The downvotes are cute, this is a very legitimate concern though. There's nothing wrong with wondering why China releasing a virus is just an "oopsie."

>It's more what it says about our government's utter incompetence. If we can't solve the problem of distributing masks in an arguably _light_ pandemic, what the hell should we expect when a worse one comes along...?

It's a tall order to fix 40 to 50 years of global offshoring in a 10 months. If COVID has taught me anything, I believe we are more likely to just grit our teeth and put up with the costs than actually try and fix the issue in the future. Americans will never buy (or could possibly afford) domestically manufactured goods. There is already fervor at increased food prices due to the labor price increases all across the food chain; you want to do the same to cups and plates? It would never be politically successful.

>The downvotes are cute, this is a very legitimate concern though. There's nothing wrong with wondering why China releasing a virus is just an "oopsie."

Because it's not a productive conversation. 1) Whether it's an "oopsie" or not, Americans were still unprepared. 2) If it's not an oopsie, what are you going to do? Invade China on a hunch? 3) Given the history of respiratory diseases in China (e.g. SARS), and the growth of China in the global economy, isn't it more likely that is SARS 2 ever occurred it would be global in nature? This isn't the first time China has had to deal with a respiratory virus.

> fix 40 to 50 years of global offshoring in a 10 months

That's... not what I asked for. We're talking respiratory cloth masks here, not the global economy.

Our discussion will be more productive if you don't put words in my mouth.

You're really trying to ignore the obvious red flags. Respiratory masks for US consumption being made in China is not a result of globalization. It's just corporate greed hiding behind virtue signals.

What makes you say it's corporate greed, rather than a very strong consumer preference for the cheapest price? In the mask-price-race-to-the-bottom, US factories aren't competitive due to wage and environmental regs.

>We're talking respiratory cloth masks here, not the global economy.

Where do you expect these masks to be made? In people's backyards? When you are talking about suppling millions of masks, you are talking about the global economy. The tooling that is used to quickly ramp production to that scale is because you can take already existing systems that are used to develop clothing and other apparel and rapidly convert them to making masks. If you don't have that, then where do you expect it to come from? If you don't already have people working in factory, making clothes, where will you find the people to start making masks? Then lets say you do find these people, on very short notice. You are now paying them american labor prices; will your potential customers just choose to source from overseas anyways?

I'm not putting words in your mouth; maybe you aren't fully aware the effort it would take to ship millions of anything on such a short timescale without having the existing infrastructure to do it; especially if that infrastructure hasn't existed for a very long time. You are putting forth a very difficult problem very matter of factly.

USA can restrict import of medical devices and already makes it broadly illegal to import medical drugs. https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-basics/it-legal-me-persona...

(I'm not advocating for these restrictions.)

The manufacturing cost in US is too high, but the productivity isn't proportionally higher.

Regulations and labor protection is good for workers, but it will increase cost and if those manufacturers have choice they will source their suppliers elsewhere.

Other comments also mentioned, that made in US isn't really a hallmark of quality across the board, if the consumers are expected to pay 2x-3x more, then it better has something extraordinary to offer, I don't think mask had that much differentiation

I don't think it's due to manufacturing costs. Just look at how much insulin costs to make and the price it's sold at in the US.

This is how companies think:

If you can make something in the US for $5 and sell it for $300 you make $295 profit.

If you can make it in China and ship it to the US for $4 you make $296 profit.

Therefore its better to make it in China. They disregard literally every other benefit.

What you give as an example is a product with insanely high margins. Here, it indeed makes sense to produce it in your home country, because it won't make a huge difference.

Most products on a market have slim margins and here such production costs make a huge difference in profit if the buyer is not willing to pay much more for products (partially) produced in the home country.

3M N95 masks are 1.9 dollars each, while the Chinese ones KN95 are 0.4 each, korea made kf94 masks are between 0.5 - 0.8. Unless 3M masks have some magic in itself (like make me immune to covid), the pricing doesn't seem very appetizing

I think it is pretty self explanatory.

The FDA and CDC made it illegal for US hospitals, companies, and universities to produce COVID tests until after the CDC effort to produce them had already failed twice. By then there was a booming business in China and South Korea making tests. We only knew about the outbreak in Seattle because some brave scientists broke the law and ran their own tests.

I would also add, as other people have mentioned, that domestic manufacturing requirements are at best over priced jobs programs through the back door.

> Why can't the US government mandate hospitals need to purchase a percentage of their supplies from US manufacturers

Off the top of my head:

1. what if US manufacturers can't supply them in sufficient quantity

2. what if US manufacturers' delivery dates are too far in the future

3. what if US manufacturers' product does not meet standard

4. what exactly is a US manufacturer anyway, in a world with a global supply chain and complex ownership structures?

5. what if there's only one US manufacturer, and so can charge monopoly prices?

Reminds me of the vocal American n95 mask producer who wasn’t operating at 100% production 2 years ago bc he has seen it all before, knew buyers wouldn’t appear just bc American and would opt for cheaper products naturally undermining stable domestic supply. If he ramped up he would just erode his profit margin, sad.

The reason for pre-pandemic masks being mostly made in India was because it was a very low profit business that basically protected the many small-medium size incumbent who already had the machinery, know-how and connections.

Once the demand goes to levels similar to 2019 and the supply-chains stabilize, no business can escape the realities of the market unless they somehow manage to undercut the competition on price even more, which in this case is almost ridiculous.

It's very common for businesses and industries that governments deem to be strategically important to be protected from market forces.

Market forces are not a moral obligation, nor are they an invitation to put a huge "kick me" sign on your back, stand in front of some proverbial John Galt, and let nature take its course. They're just a description of how things tend to naturally work out in the absence of intervention.

The big N95 mask makers seem like: 3M, Moldex, and Kimtech.

As far as I can tell, all three of these are 100% American made. A bunch of smaller companies opened up due to the N95 mask shortage for the pandemic. I'm not surprised that the smaller businesses are going out of business, but I have my doubts that the "big" ones are leaving USA either.

They are going out of the business of making masks. Isn't that a good thing?

because no surgeons, lab techs, or workers need masks when there isn’t a pandemic on.

N95 respirators get used for all sorts of stuff. I use them so i don’t breathe in sintered brake pad dust when i work on my car, for example.

Are every single one of them going out of business?

Genuinely asking because the article is paywalled.

I can't find a reference for a modern surgeon abstaining from wearing a mask while operating, could you please provide a source?

That was sarcasm.

Haha oops, thank you for the clarification.

Well, like the article says, it's a big strategic problem for the USA to not have any domestic PPE production.

2 years ago all the health care establishments in the USA really, really needed N95 masks, but couldn't get them. Because they were all manufactured overseas, and all the countries that produced them decided to temporarily stop exporting to protect their own supplies. It was a problem. The emergency department where my dad used to work nearly had to shut down for a while due to staffing shortages from his colleagues catching COVID.

It happened with H1N1, it happened with COVID-19, and now the US is negligently ensuring that it will happen to them again with the next major epidemic, too.

(Also, that phrase "used to" should perhaps be chilling to anyone who lives in the USA and does not possess a mutant healing factor.)

Instead of domestic production you could also buy them from China and put them on stock for the next pandemic, like a strategic PPE reserve.

We have one of these. For some reason it wasn't replenished after some outbreak in 2012 (H1N1, I think?)

Yes, it's a good thing, for the founders and shareholders. This isn't a story of failure, its a story of doing the next best opportunistic thing. People are conditioned to believe in a distant dream of creating corporate forever-homes, so articles write to cater to that sentiment, as opposed to simply hopping on a market need in an expedition style, or precision strike style venture.

For the country, thats a different thing. If the state wants a certain kind of transaction to occur then they need to incentivize it.

It sets a not necessarily good precedent for future pandemics. In 2020 I read an article where they interviewed a mask manufacturer in Texas asking him if he would be expanding production. He talked about how during the swine flu pandemic he purchased enough equipment to open new production lines, he hired new people, and had all these capital costs. After the pandemic, the new equipment sat unused and he had to do layoffs. The business owner said he wasn't planning on expanding production due to covid

Why, because we might have another once-in-a-century pandemic two or three years from now? We were told that we all had to drop everything and alter our daily lives because this was an exceptional crisis that hadn't been seen in generations. If that's genuinely true, who cares about precedent? Exceptional circumstances are what emergency laws are for.

I am the only one who is thankful for the adaptive Chinese industry?

Personally I am happy that I am not toiling away at some mask factory but instead sitting here, in the safety of my own home, copying pieces of JavaScript from stackoverflow into an internal webapp for some big corp, with an ample supply of masks and rapid antigen tests at my disposal.

Why is human labor required to make masks at all? You’d think it would be nearly fully automated by now. It looks like some woman sitting at some kind of giant sewing machine.

China probably can produce the masks because they are masters of economies of scale. Sure, there are still sweatshops but anyone who has actually been inside a Chinese factory knows that is selling them short. Most Chinese factories are nearly completely automated and vastly more sophisticated than anything you’ll ever see in the US. They are obsessed with automation and continuously invest back into the business, preferring ways to increase per work output with technology.

I’d compare it to Amazon, which also makes me wonder why hasn’t Amazon gotten into all sorts of manufacturing by now?

The machines to make masks are fairly cheap (100k or so, maybe less now) and with some tinkering they can be fully automated. Also gives more consistent quality.

The expensive part is the non-woven base material. I’m not sure this would be available in the US or could be stored for long. Even in CN only a few firms make it and it was the main bottleneck during Covid.

Source: worked closely with smaller CN companies to make masks and that’s what they shared with me over the previous 2 years.

> non-woven base material

what does that mean?

It's a kind of artificial textile. For face masks it needs to be small enough to filter large droplets, but large enough for air. It also has an electric charge to bind very small particles to the fabric. So not your ordinary fabric.

Easy. Just say that the masks not only protect you from Covid, but also from those identity stealing facial recognition cams!

There are a few industries that will have to consolidate now that the pandemic seems to be calming down.

Anecdotally I know of several small businesses that switched from an unrelated field to importing and selling medical and related supplies.

Testing clinics have also grown and their size will no longer be sustainable due to reduced demand.

Thee has also been a boom in delivery businesses that were sustainable when demand was overwhelming but will no longer be viable, restaurant and grocery in particular.

They also will have knock-on effects onto other businesses such as packing material. If restaurants deliver a lot less they'll need a lot fewer take-out boxes, etc

Can't the production be repurposed to making HEPA filters or vehicle filters in times of normality, then switch on the mask making machines during a pandemic?

I feel like it’s also a matter of availability and knowledge. I had no idea masks were being manufactured in the US and don’t know if they are targeted towards consumers or hospitals either. Also people buy everything through Amazon, so unless they are available there and specifically highlighted, it’s very tough for the average consumer to buy them.

These masks are made in the US (as mentioned in the listing) and they're on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/NIOSH-approved-anti-counterfeit-packa... I bought some and they're pretty good.

Never go all in on a time limited business. Gotta expand to stay afloat.

Trump T-Shirts->Covid Masks->???

While traveling through the middle US I've found some absolutely strange (to an outsider) roadside stands in the middle of nowhere selling obviously purchased in bulk from China anti-Biden merch and BLM merch (masks, shirts, caps..) at the same place

It is terrifying that you find that strange.

Catering to all regardless of political affiliation is a good indicator of the populations freedom of political thought.

Where are you from that such a thing is unusual?

"Terrifying"?

Yup. Terrifying that there is a country somewhere where it is normal for retailers to have politically motivated policies on what will be stocked or sold.

Political organisations selling T-shirts that advance their cause? Normal.

Retailers basing stock decisions based on advancing particular political ideologies? Not normal.

> Retailers basing stock decisions based on advancing particular political ideologies? Not normal

To be fair, "retailers" aren't a normal concept, being a recent innovation on human systems. Nothing about modern society is "normal".

I found it strange in a confusing/amusing manner, like there is zero politics or patriotism involved in any direction, it was just clearly a for-profit capitalistic cash grab at the cheapest possible price point.

> I found it strange in a confusing/amusing manner, like there is zero politics or patriotism involved in any direction,

Yeah, that's what you want from a retailer.

switched to dropshipping Q-Anon branded coffee mugs 8 months ago

From my experience I don't think anyone went all in. They did the opportunistic thing, and now do the next opportunistic thing or nothing. Way to go!

I believe it was the Mr. Bowen in this article that, despite heavily criticism, steadfastly refused to expand his mask-making business during the early days of the pandemic. His reason was that it would be stupid to expand his operation without long term contractual guarantees and regulatory assurances.

Good on him for holding the line. His business would be in trouble right now if he expanded because the US still obviously hasn't learned the lesson.

My guess, we'll be back wearing them again in two months.

Due to a more contagious variant?

Easing restrictions will open whole new pathways to social groups who have not yet been infected. China is about to explode, so transmission and variants to come from there. Most people are not boosted, immunity isn't gonna be as strong as we think.

In the year 2048, the drivethru at Dunkin Donuts is backed up for miles as people wait to get their free dozen donuts for getting their 100th booster. Johnny is seen jogging by without a mask as the people yell at them from their cars that he is endangering their lives.

I have bad news but we already get yearly boosters for respiratory diseases. And in pretty much every country except the US, people wear masks when they're sick.

This is good news.

People that are at high risk of the flu get yearly shots for it, but typically they are only between 40 and 60% effective. No one is saying that sick people shouldn't wear masks.

> And in pretty much every country except the US, people wear masks when they're sick.

This isn’t true. Wearing masks when sick has only been common in East Asia since SARS and that’s the only region it was common in. It’s not universal there either. There was an irritated comment in my office Friday about someone sneezing who didn’t never his mouth, never mind wearing a mask.

Possibly wearing a mask will be normalized in Western countries after this is over but I sincerely doubt people in the Congo or Malawi or Guatemala are wearing masks while sick. Lots of people and countries are dirt poor.

I'm not quite convinced. It's estimated 45% of Americans have been infected. The mRNA vaccines are still reasonably effective at stopping infection against Omicron. Lots of states have been open and it's spread; what's left is lockdown-happy coastal cities, but they're heavily vaccinated. I do expect some bump, though.

China has problems. They have essentially zero natural immunity, their vaccines aren't very good, and Omicron spreads really well. So well masks aren't even close to enough. Once contact tracing is overwhelmed, China will have to do large-scale lockdowns on-and-off for a while.

Also wars tend to make viruses evolve to more deadly variants since it's harder to isolate the sick, or at least that's the hypothesis about the 1918 flu.

One thing omicron seems to have made abundantly clear is that this virus is undergoing recombinant replication. That doesn't bode well for existing vaccines when so many hosts are unvaccinated/unexposed globally, where it can replicate and mutate readily.

The optimist in me wants to believe omicron is a sign of things to come; more infectious but less deadly variants we can largely ignore like the common cold. But what's preventing another variant emerging that's both more infectious and more deadly after ripping through one of the less vaccinated nations? The lethality aspect seems somewhat random from where I'm sitting, not an expert.

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1502340845986451456

If I don’t wear a mask, what are people gonna do about it?

Nothing.

People fold quickly when you ignore their requests to wear a mask.

So you prefer to trespass on private property while ignoring the requirements for entry available in law, posted on the door, and communicated to you directly by ignoring employees like they are non people.

Do you just do this now or were you doing this back in 2020 too?

This law is no longer needed.

That is for individual states, municipalities, and individual businesses to decide. If any of the above require it you can basically suck it up or go elsewhere.

Which law? Are you saying we can go inside of restaurants shoeless and completely naked now? And that private businesses shouldn't be allowed to kick us out?

You would be asked to leave our Quaker meeting, attend it via Zoom instead.

Do you interact with society on a regular basis? Businesses have the right to refuse service, and you will absolutely be escorted out (minimum) and will most likely have your tantrum broadcast to the internet if you pretend you are some sort of martyr.

> Businesses have the right to refuse service

Yet so many people flipped out when a business wouldn’t design a custom cake for a same-sex couple.

Which is it? Can businesses enforce their own rules and values on their own property or not?

Businesses can enforce their own rules and values except if it discriminates on protected classes of people. There is an existent argument that a business can discriminate on protected classes of people if discriminating follows their religious beliefs.

As far as I understand wearing a mask doesn't fall into either category so the gay cakes thing has very little to do with this and comes off as whataboutism.

So if we repealed the Civil Rights Act, and therefore got rid of the concept of protected classes, you would think that it is okay to discriminate on the basis of one’s sex, race, and sexual orientation?

Morality is not the same as legality.

Your comment confuses me.

Masking helps prevent spread of illness.

Legality should follow morality, but the reverse often happens.

The grandparent comment didn't appear to suggest what you're clarifying question asserts.

That comment implied that discrimination was okay unless it was against a protected class. It is reasonable to ask what they would do if there was no such thing as a protected class. Would they approve of all forms of discrimination? Or would they do as your sibling comment did and decide that actually the concept of protected classes doesn’t matter and one can pick and choose which types of discrimination are moral/immoral.

It’s very easy to have a belief that businesses should be able to pick who their customers are or that they should be forced to serve everyone, but any opinion in between is very difficult to make logically consistent.

That's true, morality and legality are different, although one hopes laws will generally reflect society's view of morality. But you're right, discriminating against people based on their race or sexual orientation is immoral regardless of its legality. And requiring a mask in one's establishment during a respiratory pandemic is entirely reasonable, regardless of its legality.

Where do you live that this is still the case? I haven’t worn a mask anywhere in over a year and no one has said anything. And these days I only see a handful of people wearing masks in a business.

No - if we see you maskless in an establishment we go somewhere else with sensible customers

Start with getting politicians in office that care.

Deal with current Politicians, Executives of multinational corporations, Pharma and the industrial complex.

When China threatened to not send the US medicine during the pandemic it should have made it clear what the US should be preparing for.

Which politicians in which party care? The current admin isn't Trump anymore.

Nothing to do with the fact that the demand for masks has cratered, with them not being required in most places anymore?

There's still some demand for them, it is just low enough that it can be met with imports.

And who could think of a reason why we might need the capability to domestically produce a bunch of masks all of a sudden, right? Inconceivable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com