Comment by samcheng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samcheng | Hacker News Reader

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Hospitals do seem to graciously accept donations, even opened (half-used) boxes of masks. You can just drive up and hand them off. Second-tier healthcare facilities, such as elder care centers and rural clinics, are also desperate for PPE right now.

We just drove up to the UCSF hospital and dropped off a couple hundred pounds of supplies. No fuss:

https://www.rinse.com/blog/rinse/covid-19-medical-supply-dri...

Here's an example organization with a long list of facilities accepting donated supplies:

https://www.donateppe.org/

I'm sure it's harder to convince the terribly inefficient US health care bureaucracy to pay for this. I noticed our local Chinese American community, combating a worrisome rise in racism, has been active in the philanthropic distribution of masks. You might try raising funding that way, instead of through the bureaucracy.

I've also noticed a reluctance to accept the Chinese KN95 standard. People don't trust it, for better or worse. I think they would rather have homemade cloth masks, to be honest. Not sure how you can change that perception.

Best of luck in your efforts!

The economic reality is that most of the chinese supply chain that creates most of the masks is KN95 because China mobilized their country for their needs first. Quality is definitely an issue, but the bureaucratic layers of many of the hospitals in the US are definitely protecting the business at the expense of the safety of front line workers. Most of them simply don't understand what is going on at the ground level of the supply chain.

As someone who spends way too much time hanging around with cynical lawyers I am not surprised by the current state of affairs.

We've spent the last 30yr using civil case law to heavily incentivize organizations to build process and follow that process even when it's stupid, push decision making higher up and remove the capacity for decisions making down low (like middle manager level) where they can happen fast.

It's not that the people want to protect the business at the expense of patients but that the business itself is structured in a way that it's impossible for the people who make it up to do break protocol that says they have to meet X Y and Z criteria when sourcing supplies without it being a fire-able offense.

Hospitals do seem to graciously accept donations, even opened (half-used) boxes of masks. You can just drive up and hand them off. Second-tier healthcare facilities, such as elder care centers and rural clinics, are also desperate for PPE right now.

There's a significant difference between donating to or working with hospitals and doing the same with medical professionals working in hospitals.

Particularly for small donations like a partial box those are probably being allocated out directly by and to clinical staff in need.

I think the KN95 issues is also a legal/health standards one. I don't know if the FDA can waive that unilaterally but they should prob think about it.

The FDA recently said they would not block import of KN95s, and also issued an EUA on April 3rd that allows approved KN95s to be used in medical applications.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/the-fda-no...

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/personal-protective-equi...

That is fantastic news, thank you for sharing!!!

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