The only way we can adequately manage risk in healthcare in a pandemic with an airborne pathogen is by having sustainable processes & resources in place to cope with a high volume of cases.
Stockpiles of disposable PPE expire & run out quickly, ramping up processes/skills takes too long, & we can’t rely on building infrastructure being brought up to scratch in a hurry.
Airborne precautions for respiratory tract pathogens needs to be an increasing part of our healthcare routine.
@PieterPeach Yes. But that needs to be kept up with steady consumption for a long time.
There are already a healthy number of people continuously consuming them (medical and industrial), but that has been dropping-off somewhat.
I think regulations requiring them in places like nursing homes and hospitals wouldn't hurt either. Or military, especially Navy, which I often wonder about because not a lot has been said about that.
@PieterPeach One thing I think about is how well Germany did in the early stages of the pandemic, because of their "overbuilt" health system. Then you had places like the US where people were shipping all across the US to find an open ICU bed. And then there were the horrors of places in South America without adequate access to medical oxygen.
@PieterPeach Companies like Armbrust demonstrated that you could build vertically integrated facilities for high volume mask production in under a year. You could create a small range of government standardized pandemic mask designs and build out ~300 of those factories across the US and keep them in warm standby/low volume production with guaranteed minimum purchase rate contracts, etc. and the ability to surge production to meet pandemic demands.
They may be able to produce at volume, but they still require raw materials (filter media was a bottleneck) and supply pipelines.
It took months for them to eventually deliver at volume
We should absolutely maintain minimum purchase contracts for appropriate PPE and may benefit by moving some of the demand away from surgical/medical masks to something designed for respiratory protection.
Companies in China for instance received structural state support in the form of low cost polymer feedstocks. Armbrust eventually built their own meltblown manufacturing line, but received no such support. Even then, he was able to get the cost of his ASTM3 surgical masks down to ~10 cents a mask.
The time to get his basic cup design N95 approved in the midst of a pandemic was ridiculous.
“The very first canon of nursing … is this: to keep the air [the patient] breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him.” —Florence Nightingale c. 1850
@harold it would absolutely be, but it’s only one component. Ventilation assessments undertaken in some hospitals here in our region demonstrated that the buildings were not fit for purpose and patients were moved out during the pandemic. New hospital infrastructure needs new considerations (fewer/no shared rooms), better ventilation with appropriate directional flow etc.
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