NEWS
Why is it so hard to produce new masks?
It has been difficult for the average American to get masks in local pharmacies, health supply stores and on Amazon since February even when American health experts explicitly said, at the time when relatively few people were known to be infected, that healthy people didn’t need to wear them. People hoarded masks and respirators out of fear or shipped them to countries where it was prohibitively expensive or just difficult to buy.
However, the recommendations about wearing masks in public have changed as the US’s case count surpassed 14,000 by mid-March, with some Covid-19 patients being asymptomatic or only exhibiting mild symptoms. Shan Soe-Lin and Robert Hecht of the nonprofit Pharos Global Health Advisors published an op-ed in the Boston Globe on March 19 writing, ‘Masks work. There is widespread evidence from the field of occupational health, the SARS epidemic, and other outbreaks that wearing masks protects us from germs and interrupts the transmission of disease from sick to healthy people.’ They suggested for the average person to cover their face with nonmedical masks when leaving the house, using accessories like bandanas or scarves.
So why is it so hard to produce new masks? The New York Times reported that China made half of the world’s masks before the outbreak, and while factory production has increased nearly twelvefold, the country has kept most of its inventory so as to control the virus. US mask manufacturers are also seeing unprecedented demand for masks, with Prestige Ameritech, the country’s biggest producer, aiming to make 1 million masks a day, compared to an average 250,000 before the pandemic.
