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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

> People need to be required to wear a mask when they go out.

Well, you can’t do that here because those masks don’t exist. We don’t have enough for healthcare workers, much less everyone else.

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I think in this case any piece of cloth will do - we're not talking N95s. Basically, it reduces the likelihood of spittle etc. and so it reduces spread.

That said Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore are all riding the Subways, going to Restaurants, going to work.

They're more aggressive with testing and tracking.

It also keeps your hands away from your mucus membranes. Just tying a bandana around your face is absolutely a useful mitigation. But staying home is better.

If anything it makes you touch your face more -- masks are weird and itchy, and they need to be adjusted when they slip.

There's good reasons why the CDC, Public Health England, The World Health Organisation, etc etc all say that masks don't work. ANd that's because they don't work.

> Just tying a bandana around your face is absolutely a useful mitigation.

This "protective" mask will helpfully absorb any moisture droplets and hold them in place in front of your mouth and nose, and you will breathe in the virus as these droplets dry out. https://twitter.com/MedtechMustKnow/status/12412950342860841...

The CDC actually says masks work if you dig down to details.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/10/2/03-0730_article

During SARS, they reduced risk by 70%, and that’s among the general public, not healthcare workers. No reason it’d be different here.

The Instagram and Etsy crowd need to popularize fashionable home-made masks like the ones the new Slovakian president wears.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/fmeyis/corona_fashi...

And day before https://i.redd.it/njkm2on8kwn41.jpg

It's probably not surprising to anyone who knows how industrial production works, but to a layman like me it's really surprising how hard it seems to be to produce more suitable masks in a short time. I didn't expect the supply chain and machines for such simple products to be that complex and hard to set up.

It's probably not hard to increase production, but it's definitely hard to increase it 100x.

I have no clue about softer materials, but setting up the tooling for making the simplest of plastic parts is a multi-step process where each step takes weeks. And, for roughly the same reasons as in software development, making that shorter is likely to be both expensive and drop some quality. With medical equipment you generally don't want to drop quality. So, if making these masks is any similar to the only industrial process I know about, we might have the needed capacity just in time for the autumn rebound.

Not surprising at all. First off you need screens, molds, and other one-per-machine equipment that has to be fully custom to whatever product you want to build. When expedited, these things can still take a week or more to create.

From there you need to assemble a pipeline and do an enormous amount of tuning. Your first runs are generally going to completely unusable products because of a large number of mistakes in the manufacturing process. It takes time (also generally weeks) to find all the places where errors are happening and make the appropriate adjustments.

When you are making 10,000 (or more) of something per day, no product is "simple".

That's what happens when manufacturing is outsource to China. They were able to ramp up by 20x and produce 200 million mask per day. As a comparison, 3M makes 300 million per year and said they will increase by 30%.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/16/8149292...

And the response is to tell people "don't worry! Masks don't help. They only work for doctors!"

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...

Like inkjet cartridges, masks have a DRM chip: if they detect you are not licensed to use them, they stop working!

I don't think this is necessarily contradictory. Masks need to be worn correctly and not be reused. There's a good chance that a lot of people are wearing them incorrectly, and most people aren't going to have a sufficient supply on hand to avoid reuse. As such, they might give some people a false sense of security.

This article gets into some of the potential issues: http://blogs.hcpro.com/osha/2009/05/ask-the-expert-n95-respi...

It at least seems plausible that for the average person masks won't do much good and that it's much more important for health care and public safety workers to have access to them.

Since my N95 respirator supply is limited, I have been removing it in the car and spritzing it with 91% alcohol inside and out until moist. It is usually dry in minutes, and should be sterile for the next use.

I've been baking mine in a 350 degree oven

Interesting, hadn't considered that one...how long and are the 'rubbers' holding up? Also cheers on that article...I've been finding it confounding that both masks and disposable gloves are NOT being preached in all media, if one must go into confining public spaces.

The "rubber" seems to hold up fine. It's in a convection oven, I bring it to temperature, with a dish of water in it, and then bake it for 10 minutes. I have no idea if it's clean or not, of course.

That study is great, but why no UV-C tests? I’ve been using a UV-C decontamination box I made cheaply. It seems safe and effective for a couple of rounds of decontamination.

https://www.nebraskamed.com/sites/default/files/documents/co...

Was just studying on Far-UVC (222nm) as being much safer than C, yet more effective (literally second(s)) to kill virus..I suspect we will see vast deployments of this light coming to public spaces near you.

https://www.laserfocusworld.com/lasers-sources/article/16555...

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

This study tried several methods of decontamination including soaking it in alcohol or bleach or even baking it in a rice cooker.

TLDR baking damaged it only slightly but alcohol and bleach significantly damaged it

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320361295_Filter_qu...

which masks are we talking about here? cloth masks used throughout the population effectively reduce the transmission rate

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