“He’s hesitant, however, to ramp up production at the facility outside Fort Worth, scarred by the boom-bust mess that occurred after the swine flu pandemic in 2009.”

“ But after the pandemic, demand declined, and it took months for hospitals and distributors to go through the surplus of masks they had ordered but never used. Prestige Ameritech had to let most of its new workers go. ‘Everybody said they’d stay with us. The day after the pandemic they forgot who we were. We nearly went out of business‘“

“A lack of planning on their part is not an emergency on my part,” Bowen said. “They had their chance. I told them over and over.”

That article contains a great background on the lack of long-term preparation.

Wow. Seems like the easiest and simplest step imaginable for the CDC or some other federal department to step in and give a large minimum volume commitment immediately, and put this particular fear to rest...

Agreed. This seems like an institutional failure to me.

It wasn’t guaranteeing the initial manufactured volume that was the challenge, it was the continuous orders after the crisis. All the US MBA’s and purchasing departments went back to China-supplied JIT supply chains. To compound the JIT mistake, they ignored the owner when he told them the next time this happens, he’s not risking his business to bail out everyone.

This is a US Federal government-scale public utility problem space. Hand the US factory-based US PPE companies a 35-year contract rolled over once a year. They are to build out capacity in several separate facilities for up to 10% of US population per day, paid entirely by federal taxpayer funds. Train skeleton DOD and DHHS staff on how to maintain and run it, keep key personnel in primary facility on alternating shifts with federal equivalents. Run skeleton output for DoD and social welfare-related consumption. Improvements in primary facility are simultaneously performed in national strategic facilities. Company keeps manufacturing on a JIT basis as they are market-forced to today.

Develop standards and protocols to store the PPE for 30 year durations, and intermixing with normal supplies to keep rotating them. Ideally design some kind of factory-reusable retort pouch, and make the PPE reusable with sufficient treatment, and easy-to-use validation testing. Normally let the factory reman the used-once gear to identify and fix field problems. Set a stockpile goal that gives the strategic factories time to spin up in enough time to fluidly cover a pandemic response.

Then turn around and start contact tracing the JIT decisions, and tell them they have 10 years to clean up their act and lay in stockpiles and best practices. Hold natural persons responsible.

I’m guessing some kind of plan like this is languishing in the now-disbanded CDC pandemic response leadership. Extreme risk planning has been a marked oversight of American-style business leadership, and I see no incentive nor reason it will ever change.

This is where price restrictions during disasters run into issues. We either need to allow price to go up, to make it economical for the private sector to maintain offline capacity and stockpiles of these kinds of supplies, or we need a government that plans effectively for these scenarios. We can't get away with neither.

Please provide an accurate source for that claim.

ETA: unsure why the huge up and down vote swings. OP claimed only one company made masks in the US which is not accurate and then they edited with their source. No idea why I’ve went -1 to +5 and back for originally asking for a source.

I usually try to stay out of downvote discussions -- the HN guidelines ask us to not engage in such -- but I'm going to suggest that you are going to see a lot more trigger-happy downvotes because there's a pandemic on and it satisfies some psychological desire to shut something -- anything! -- down with a vengeance and post haste.

I would be inclined to assume that voting on all forums will be less rational, less calm, cool and collected and yadda for some weeks to come.

And when people are actually sick and running a fever, that will amplify the problem. I live with chronic health issues and other stressors. No amount of provisos is ever enough to get other people to not have knee jerk stupid reactions to me failing to be perfectly calm, cool and collected.

I imagine you are going to see a whole lot of upset and unwell people bouncing off each other and escalating tension instead of calming it down and this will go on for the duration of the crisis. As a wild ass guess.