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Comment by libertine | Hacker News Reader

The best outcome is to have some development regarding N95 production, because it's not going to happen in the current scenario.

I'm not from America. I'm from Europe. So you're basically saying we need tens of billion of masks worldwide... that simply won't happen.

I understand that would be the optimal solution in your opinion. But some countries are showing good results with a not so optimal solution, which is surgical masks and home made masks.

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In the US we are using the Defense Production Act to make ventilators--this is good, but really we need the focus to be on N95 masks. With the current level of disinformation regarding droplet spread this isn't happening--this is the tragedy. We need the leaders of the world to realize that it really is N95 masks that are going to be the key. You can safely restart more portions of the economy with everyone wearing PPE that is of high quality and effective. The fact that this isn't priority one is mind boggling.

The problem of N95 is sourcing the plastic mesh with static charge - the major filtration portion.

As odd as this my sound, but at the moment you might have a larger bottle neck in N95 production than you have on ventilators (taking into account the disposable nature of N95 masks and the sheer volume required for usage, I'm not trying to compare ventilators to N95 in terms of complexity or their production lines).

Of all of this, I think an effective treatment seems to be the fastest solution (though there's none available yet), where you'd deploy treatment only to those in intensive care and ICU.

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