Have you seen the White House briefings? Long on kowtowing to Dear Leader and really short on details. That will tell you everything you need to know.

tl;dr We're using a bottom up strategy and the Chinese were top down.

You need a tightly organized system that responds to a comprehensive plan devised and administered uniformly from the top. Also a population that is used to taking orders from a central government that is able to enforce the orders. For the longest time our president was in denial, saying things like "it will go away when the weather gets warm" and "I have a hunch this won't be that bad".

All hands should have been on deck back then and they weren't. And we're that much farther behind.

The US government doesn't have the type of control the Chinese government does. Neither does it have a populace that will roll over and do what is necessary. We're all seeing examples of people doing whatever they damn well please. Carp, even the governor of Florida won't close down the beaches.

We are a much looser conglomeration of states and local governments who have a lot of autonomy. We also have a huge federal machine and a legislative body that moves at a snail's pace.

We don't have a strong hand at the helm of the executive branch; we just have someone who is constantly blaming anybody else and trying to happy talk his way through this mess. He has no idea how to manage this crisis. And he refuses to step out of the way and cede control to anyone competent.


We've dismantled or reduced much of the structure of the federal government that would normally respond to this kind of crisis. We've lost the best and the brightest that the administration had to offer because they've been fired by the president for some offense or another. We're down to the third- and fourth-stringers, and they have no experience doing this. They are figuring this out as we go along.

Governors are asking for military assistance to build hospitals. The federal government should be out front looking at this. Finally, when backed into a corner in the last two days, they're sending help to build military style hospitals in heavily affected areas.

States are asking for equipment and help with the front line battle in hospitals, and the president says "we're not a shipping service, find your own supplies". Then they finally figure it out and start touting how great the feds are for sending stuff.

It's like a Kafka novel.

This is the guy who ignored warnings from his own intelligence agency that there were problems brewing in China, meanwhile tweeting merrily about everything else. And the one who said he knows more about things than the generals. And who lost it when a reporter gave him an opening to say some encouraging and reassuring things to the country. He can't see past his own fragile ego.

Short of a military coup and someone taking over the White House, I don't see how we change this. We'll continue to blunder along and the people on the front lines will continue to do their best. As will the rest of us.

I guess I'm not sure I understand what seems to be a fixation on testing. That takes a lot of resources and it will tell us what we already know. This is really big.

Superfine tuning which people you quarantine works when there are just a few. The spread of this is way beyond that strategy.

Testing everyone - repeatedly - COULD be an important part of the containment because people are contagious before they show any symptoms. The earlier a country can keep a contagious person from interacting (even at social distance) with others, the better chance to slow the spread...

The way America is doing testing? Not so good.

quote:

Originally posted by rontuner:
Testing everyone - repeatedly - COULD be an important part of the containment because people are contagious before they show any symptoms. The earlier a country can keep a contagious person from interacting (even at social distance) with others, the better chance to slow the spread...

The way America is doing testing? Not so good.

The latest info suggests that we've moved past testing to mitigation (in other words, there's no point in testing, it's too late and the disease is already too widespread). The doctors are saying, even if we know you have it, we can't treat it unless it's severe, so if you have a temperature and a cough, assume you have it. And, even if you don't have it, socially isolate anyway. So ... right now ... they are saying widespread testing serves no useful purpose, and actually is harmful, because it uses up limited supplies of personal protective equipment for no particular reason.

quote:

Originally posted by piqué:
As I said " assuming it is possible to meet demand"

Why couldn't we do what the Chinese did? Build hospitals in ten days? Mass produce thousands of respirators and millions of masks on a dime? Has anyone here actually looked into why not? Or are you just repeating what you've read?

I'm so shocked at how lazy the reporting has been on this.

Has no one thought to call the top 5 manufacturers and ask them what they're doing and what they've done to ramp up production? I haven't found this, and I've looked. Surely they've done something, but no one wants to report on it.

Trump hasn't invoked the defense production act, seems like that's overdue for respirators, masks, etc.

What's happening in Canada to support getting new companies into manufacturing supplies. Canadian government putting money where its mouth is.

Skip past the stuff about distilleries making hand sanitizer.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/busine...-sanitizer-1.5502759

And it looks like the big mask manufacturers are 3M, Prestige Ameritech, Honeywell, and Kimberley Clark (now Halyard Health).

Article from Feb 28th.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/2...avirus-outbreak.html

We've all heard Pence's stories about 3M, so I'll skip them. Here's some info on the major players.

Prestige Ameritech:

WaPo article from February 15.

Steve Bannon.

quote:

As demand spikes for medical equipment, this Texas manufacturer is caught in coronavirus’s supply chain panic

An executive at a U.S. firm that makes surgical masks had warned for years that there could be a shortage, learning a painful lesson years ago about the boom and bust of health scares

As the number of coronavirus cases in China skyrocketed in the past week, a small Texas manufacturer was inundated with orders from 8,000 miles away. Then, Stephen K. Bannon reached out.

Prestige Ameritech, the largest full-line domestic surgical mask manufacturer, was producing 600,000 masks each day but struggling to meet demand. Mike Bowen, the company’s executive vice president, received cold calls on his cellphone from people saying they represented foreign governments and wanted to make bulk purchases. The Hong Kong government and Hong Kong International Airport wanted more. Everyone was hunting for masks.

Instead of celebrating the business boom, Bowen was indignant. This is the precise scenario he began warning about almost 15 years ago, when he pleaded with federal agencies and lawmakers to boost U.S. production of medical masks. He had predicted an eventual health scare and not enough manufacturers. He was right.

So there Bowen was on Wednesday as a guest on Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic” podcast, tormented that no one in power had listened. Bannon, a former top adviser to President Trump, has long cautioned about the decline of U.S. manufacturing.

“What I’ve been saying since 2007 is, 'guys, I’m warning you, here’s what is going to happen, let’s prepare,’” Bowen said on the program. “Because if you call me after it starts, I can’t help everybody.”

The coronavirus outbreak has led to a health crisis, a diplomatic fiasco and, increasingly, an economic mess. It has also exposed major vulnerabilities in the medical supply chain. Many U.S. companies, especially hospitals and pharmaceutical firms, rely on Chinese manufacturers for products ranging from the active ingredients of prescription drugs to protective gear like masks and gloves.

Now, much appears upended.

There is no global, centralized plan for fast-tracking production of what’s known as personal protective equipment. There is no streamlined process for deciding where to send masks, disposable gowns, goggles and gloves. There is Bowen and his cellphone, and Bannon’s podcast, and Asian governments and people scrambling for masks on Amazon and eBay, and the stack of letters Bowen sent White House officials over three administrations — but that he’s not sure anyone ever read.

“Prestige Ameritech is presently the lone voice warning of the insecure U.S. mask supply,” Bowen wrote to President Barack Obama in June 2010. “Apathy and inertia are our biggest hurdles.”

“The U.S. protective mask supply could — and mostly likely would — be disrupted, confiscated or diverted in the event of a pandemic,” Bowen wrote to President Trump three years ago.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...texas-manufacturing/

quote:

In an attempt to keep up with demand, Prestige Ameritech’s management team is working 80-hour weeks, bringing previously idle machines online, and hiring and training dozens of new employees to augment its staff of around 100. Back in what Bowen calls the “peacetime,” before the pandemic, Prestige Ameritech made roughly 250,000 masks a day. Now the company has ramped production up to 1 million masks a day.

But even that isn’t enough. “Since February 1, we’ve had to turn down orders for 100 million masks or more a day on average,” Bowen says. “Sometimes, we turn down 200 million or 300 million [masks] a day. It’s kind of surreal.”

US mask manufacturers say they are experiencing unprecedented demand. With the pandemic and trade restrictions pressuring already-overwhelmed global supply chains, companies are struggling to keep up. Like much of the mask manufacturing industry, industrial giant 3M has been ramping up production since January—including expanding the output of its US based factories, hosting job fairs, and hiring employees on the spot. Yet some US hospitals are still unable to obtain new shipments of surgical masks and N95 respirators.

“There’s a really, really high demand for respirators and really all other products being used in response to the coronavirus to help treat and protect people,” Jennifer Ehrlich, communications manager for 3M told WIRED. “It’s more demand than any one company can supply, and we expect it to remain high for the foreseeable future.”

https://www.wired.com/story/su...-biggest-mask-maker/

I'll look for Honeywell and Kimberley Clark (edit: now Halyard Health). Back in a little bit.

Honeywell. The company reached out with a plan, rather than the federal government contacting them.

quote:

In an effort to more rapidly respond to the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump’s aide Peter Navarro on Monday said Honeywell is setting up a mask-making factory in Smithfield.

Navarro, the White House trade adviser, said he got a call from officials at the international conglomerate, who said they could start producing masks within a month if they receive the required regulatory approval to establish the operation.

“On Friday night, I got them to submit their proposal and got assurance from [Health and Human Services] that they’re going to flip that within a couple of days,” Navarro said during an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “As we speak, Honeywell is getting ready to set up a mask factory in Smithfield, Rhode Island.”

Honeywell spokesperson Eric Krantz said the company is well-positioned to further help the U.S. government address the response effort. But declined to provide more specific detail at this time about what the operation might look like in Smithfield.

“We have already increased production at multiple facilities globally to address the growing demand and are rapidly moving to add capacity in the U.S. for N95 face masks,” Krantz said.

The announcement comes at a time the federal government is scrambling to respond to the fast-spreading coronavirus that causes COVID-19, a disease that’s killed more than 6,500 people across the globe.

In addition to the partnership with Honeywell, Navarro said the federal government is working with FedEx to help ship medical swabs across the country to increase the level of testing available to those feeling ill.

Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo later slammed the federal government for its response to the outbreak so far, saying the state’s health care system needs faster access to — among other things — protective equipment to help front line health care workers.

“I’m out of patience at this point,” Raimondo said during a press conference. “We are in OK shape right now, but this is not OK how the federal government is responding.”

https://www.wpri.com/health/co...house-official-says/

Back in 2015 we gave some money to Halyard Health to develop a high speed machine for rapid manufacture of N95 masks.

quote:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (HHS/ASPR) today announced support for development of a high-speed manufacturing line to produce N95 respirators to meet surges during a pandemic event.

Halyard Health Inc., formerly Kimberly-Clark Health Care, has been awarded a contract by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of HHS/ASPR, to develop a one-of-a-kind, high-speed machine for rapid manufacture of N95 Filtering Facepiece Respirators (FFRs).

These types of respirators are used in health care settings to prevent the transmission of microorganisms through airborne particles. Development of the high-speed manufacturing line will take place under a 14-month, $1.6 million contract, which can be extended for two years and $5 million.

U.S. manufacturing companies currently can produce up to about 150,000 respirators per day on a single machine. However, an analysis by the Institute of Medicine conducted in 2006 estimated that during a pandemic, at least 90 million respirators would be needed in a 42-day period to treat influenza patients safely in U.S. health care settings.

“Pandemic preparedness in the United States is imperative to protecting health and saving lives, and respirator manufacturing capacity remains a critical gap in that preparedness,” BARDA Director Robin Robinson, Ph.D., said. “Innovations in manufacturing like this high-speed line can help bridge that gap and by applying innovative approaches to manufacturing day-to-day, we improve readiness.”

Through the new BARDA-supported project, Halyard Health will research and test manufacturing processes, core manufacturing components, and design a new manufacturing line capable of functioning at high speeds to allow for greater surge capacity and rapid availability during a pandemic. If successful, the technology could be available to replace outdated and slow machines with high-speed machines that can produce between one and two million N95 respirators in one day.

“Halyard is pleased to have been selected by HHS to try to help solve this real problem,” said Lee Burnes, vice president, research and development at Halyard. “All government agencies agree that a shortage of respirators will occur during a pandemic. So, we have a real opportunity to demonstrate our expertise and help make a difference in an area of critical need by performing research on the ability to develop an on-demand, high-speed machine that will make use of stockpiled raw materials to produce respirators.”

The effort will improve and expand medical countermeasure manufacturing capabilities for the U.S. that will result in a cost-effective approach for mitigating the projected shortages of the most commonly used FFRs – that protect healthcare workers from both droplet and aerosol transmission of infections during a pandemic.

https://globalbiodefense.com/2...masks-for-pandemics/

Not finding anything a) about whether they developed the machine or b) what, if anything, they are doing right now to ramp up production.

But I only looked for a few minutes...

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:

quote:

Originally posted by piqué:
As I said " assuming it is possible to meet demand"

Why couldn't we do what the Chinese did? Build hospitals in ten days? Mass produce thousands of respirators and millions of masks on a dime? Has anyone here actually looked into why not? Or are you just repeating what you've read?

I'm so shocked at how lazy the reporting has been on this.

Has no one thought to call the top 5 manufacturers and ask them what they're doing and what they've done to ramp up production? I haven't found this, and I've looked. Surely they've done something, but no one wants to report on it.

Trump hasn't invoked the defense production act, seems like that's overdue for respirators, masks, etc.

I agree, jon.

It's certainly necessary to assess the reality of *what is.*

It's even more important to assess what is needed that we do not have, and use creativity, imagination, and policy to create a different reality.

And quit saying "we can't." We can do anything we decide to do. We just have to use the art of the possible and set our intention. That's what FDR did at the height of the Depression. We need our leaders to rise to the occasion. And if they don't, we need to be our own leaders.

That's exactly what I've been trying to say.

edit: Except that I'm already way past relying on the federal government for leadership.