Posted on 03/28/2020 12:59:13 PM PDT by rintintin
The media is full of stories of mask rationing and shortages. Health care professionals are reusing masks, slathering them with sanitizer, or substituting scarves in place of surgical masks. Democrats demand that President Trump make more masks immediately using the Wartime Production Act.
But why arent there any masks?
Surgical masks, like anything in the medical field, are tightly regulated. You cant just make a mask. Some masks have to be certified by the FDA and others by the CDC. Some are certified by both the FDA and the CDC.
Until recently, the public had no problem buying N95 respirators for use in construction. These masks are certified by the CDC. Why is the CDC in the business of certifying industrial masks, you may wonder? Because, as discussed previously, the CDC does every possible thing except what people think it does. The component of the CDC that does this is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
NIOSH is not to be confused with OSHA, even though they were created at the same time, through the same law, and serve a very similar function: making this another skein in the infinitely tangled web of the federal bureaucracy.
The Open PPE Project launched an effort to quickly create N95 masks only to be told by NIOSH that approving a new mask production facility would take between 45 and 90 days.
Meanwhile there are reports of large stockpiles of masks sitting around waiting for an FDA inspector.
The United States government has a stockpile of 12 million NIOSH approved masks and 5 million that are expired, and are therefore not approved by NIOSH. Except it may approve some conditionally for use.
The FDA and CDC bureaucracy are not up to speed with the current crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
Have 3D printer, will make mask body.
You’re right on the money re the N95 shortcomings.
Not only are those 95 grade paper masks not very good at stopping stuff (esp around the sides), they’ll fog your glasses up in a heartbeat.
With razor sharp blades/bits spinning at godawful RPMs, fogged glasses are not a good thing.
Although any mask is a pita, that 3M 6391 w/P100 filters is not only specced to 99.98% but ALSO let’s me see.
So while nothing that I know of is specced to 100%, at least I didn’t end up with bloody stumps for fingers from foggy glasses.
I’m no fool (but, I do live where we currently have a shitty government, led by a world-class virtue-signaler).
No doubt, mistakes have been, are being, and will continue to be made by the Trump administration & those should be called out. However, that does not make you right about this instance.
Consider what Trump has been dealing with, since before day one.
* He can’t fire any holdovers from previous administrations — no matter how incompetent or corrupt.
* When this contagion was gathering speed in China, Trump was tied down by the Lilliputians in Congress, for the bogus impeachment proceedings.
Do you expect anyone to believe, for even a moment, that Trump could have (for instance) instituted a country-wide lockdown while the impeachment hearings and trial were proceeding? If so, consider where three of your fingers were pointing, when you pointed to me as a fool.
Stylish maybe, effective, not so much.
Effective in helping you not pick your nose or touch most of your face. Maybe helps the self-perception of pritection. But worth nothing much for the “airborne virus”
Diaphragm moves in chest cavity, creates negative pressure in the thorax relative to the outside, air rushes in.
Add a mask (no semi-rigid seal to the face), air goes through past of least obstruction, around and through any gap, however small it is.
If you think the surface of the filter media is going to catch the sub-micron sized virus, not very likely. The mask media might catch the virus on a droplet like someone sneezed in your face, but only because of that mist-like droplet is many orders of magnitude bigger and heavier than the virus.
Hey, why don’t we go out to our local nuclear power plant, who on occasion has to control against airborne particulate radioactive material, and commandeer all of their “masks”?
To answer my own question, Rad Control professionals don’t have N95 or any other type of half-face elastic band mask on hand, they don’t have them because they don’t work!
If you were to send someone wearing a N95 mask into an area with airborne particulate for ~ 10 minutes, they would be sent straight to the body counter when they exit to see if the activity is just on their face and in their nose, or they were breathing heavy enough to make it to their lungs. The radioactive footprint is obvious.
FWIW, nuclear airborne radioactive particulate control is done with, at minimum, a full face respirator, quantitatively fit test on the clean-shaven individual’s face. Or some other respiratory protection maybe more rigorous. The same principles would apply to airborne virus control.
I’m not sure that the filter on any type of mask would actually “catch” a random virus floating in the air, there is a finite limit to a filter pore size that you can actually pull air through while breathing normally. Plus no one has revealed the micron size of a garden-variety corona virus outside body. I think that size is shockingly small, tenths or hundredth’s of a micron.
N95 or surgeon’s masks are better than nothing, but are NOT worth the freakout for the NY Governor or any average citizen to walk around the grocery store. BTW, the shoppers wearing the mask keep trolling the toilet paper aisle longingly looking for more.
SEIU was found with millions of masks stored away for a rainy day. Sheesh!
“.Just in time supply chain management.”
Yes that’s a term for it.
Yesterday Obama’s CDC Director Tom Frieden was on so-called Firing Line and that’s the term he used for it. He didn’t mention that he was responsible for deciding to do it that way.
“Thats OK. But trump has been around for 3 1/2 years. He doesnt get off without some responsibility.”
It does not seem it changed.
It may have, to some degree, but we don’t know.
You don’t suppose that Congress tying Trump up in a fake impeachment process, during the time this contagion was ramping up in China, slowed him down? How on Earth could Trump, e.g., institute a national lockdown, while under impeachment? I can’t even begin to imagine the reactions to that.
The object in regards to SARS-CoV-2 is not to stop one unit of virus from getting in. None of the medical masks will do that, and the medical racket can’t afford to go to MOPP 4 (which I’ve done many times, including running long distances with full loads). The object is to reduce and moderate the viral load going into the body. Homemade masks, if made and used properly, will do that.
There are references and links to research in the following.
Can DIY Masks Protect Us from Coronavirus?
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/diy-homemade-mask-protect-virus-coronavirus/
What Are The Best Materials for Making DIY Masks?
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/best-materials-make-diy-face-mask-virus/
I expect the people running the departments who were supposed to prepare the budgets to make their case over their three budget seasons.
When this is done we will hear how this stuff was cut because there wasnt enough money.
And that goes on everyone, not just who was in charge 4 years ago.
No. But you know how Chinese citizens living in the USA are; SNEAKY, SECRETIVE, MILITANT, UNFRIENDLY and duty-bound UNDER CHINESE LAW to SPY for China and ASSIST THE COMMUNIST STATE AND THE CHINESE PEOPLE ABOVE ALL ELSE.
“Have any data to back that up? receipts, shipping manifest, photos...?”
[No. But you know how Chinese citizens living in the USA are; SNEAKY, SECRETIVE, MILITANT, UNFRIENDLY and duty-bound UNDER CHINESE LAW to SPY for China and ASSIST THE COMMUNIST STATE AND THE CHINESE PEOPLE ABOVE ALL ELSE. ]
I dont doubt any of that. But it seems farfetched to think the Chi-Coms would sabotage us ahead of time by buying up and shipping out our supply of masks when almost all of the masks came from China to start with. If this was the plan they could have just delayed the shipments indefinitely or better, sold defective masks.
They are all gone. Can't get more.
The Open PPE Project launched an effort to quickly create N95 masks only to be told by NIOSH that approving a new mask production facility would take between 45 and 90 days.
Meanwhile there are reports of large stockpiles of masks sitting around waiting for an FDA inspector.
This is why we have an Executive in our Constitutional Republic, because that role is the only way to respond quickly, but the bureaucracy is too big - and too uncooperative - to even find these roadblocks in a timely manner.
Recall the whole testing fiasco, where the clamp-down on locally-designed tests was invoked by the declaration of an emergency, requiring all tests to be approved by the FDA and their laborious processes. It took 25 days for that to percolate up, and less than 2 days for the executive to resolve that 1 of many issues coming up.
The United States government has a stockpile of 12 million NIOSH approved masks and 5 million that are expired, and are therefore not approved by NIOSH.
“Expired” just means they have had more chance for the packaging to be compromised and things to begin growing on them. Re-sterilization is the only issue that would seem an issue.
So I told my Korean colleagues - thank you, but Im not getting involved in this mess
. Welcome to 21st century America.
When I started to setup a manual milling machine in order to show my students how to make a gear, one of them commented, “I didn’t know you could make gears. I thought you had to buy them”.
.Just in time supply chain management.
Won’t wear it outside though for fear of causing heart attacks and/or making peoples’ hair spontaneously combust.
Thats a plus if you ask me.
L
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