Pandemic Manufacturing Challenges
The cluster focuses on the difficulties in rapidly scaling production of masks, ventilators, PPE, and other essentials during the COVID-19 crisis, highlighting bottlenecks like machinery setup, supply chains, workforce, and risks of overproduction.
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Stockpile how? This is typical niche product, nobody assumes this will be needed in huge quantities. There was a post on HN about how difficult is to produce those masks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22613061) and that setting up assembly line for needed materials takes 6 months (6 months in Germany, who are already producing this stuff).
Why couldn't we just manufacture more?
Not true during crises, eg covid related manufacturing.
Was mask manufacturing capacity during the pandemic an issue?
You would think that by now they would have done something to ramp production capacity…
Yes, for sure.As another abstract example that's completely disconnected from the real world: if we're running the world's capacity to make n95 masks at high utilization, it may take a while to be able to handle a sudden spike in demand.
> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality.Isn't this the point of the DPA? The government promises private industry that they will buy a certain amount of product to make it worth industry's while to increase production as though the crisis (and thus demand) were going to last more than 6 months? And I get that the machi
Perhaps they can retool and crank out ventilator/etc parts
If you invest in more manufacturing capacity and demand doesn't materialize you're just losing money. So what happens is that manufacturers try to make their company as lean as possible because they assume an unpredictable event like a pandemic will never happen and only produce exactly as many units as needed since there is no benefit to overproduce even a little bit. Once demand starts to explode during the epidemic there is no headroom to produce more masks.
There are plenty of places where you can buy hand sanitizer currently. Any sort of manufacturing takes time to ramp up. There’s a usual demand for freezers and that’s how much is typically made. If everyone decides they want a freezer there’s not enough. Why is this surprising? Sure they may start manufacturing more freezers now, but it’s going to take time and it’s not clear if demand will stay high, so who knows how much will be made. These things continue to be made, so our supply chain is no