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Comment by remram | Hacker News Reader

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

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?)

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.

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.

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.

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