This Thread Blows - C19 and beyond

Patrick said:
But there has to be some forward thinkers out there that
can put something out without the worry of litigation(meaning exemption) in an attempt to save some people in the short term -
as in start two weeks ago, and be pumping them out this week.
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I believe that what you point at is called a 'disclaimer'...
 
As I said earlier, 3m did double their production of n95's in January. As I'm sure other manufacturers did as well. But the hospitals are easily going through 10x what they usually would and they never have much more than a weeks supply to begin with. So even doubling production is just a drop in the bucket.
 
Paul H said:
In my line of work, every factory I have visited has spare machinery on stand by for just the occasion. If you are saying this is not the case for PPE manufacturers... Then I have nothing to say.
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How much those machine cost? I don't think that any business would buy a spare $6M (if @pooriggy had the price right) just in case.

Mahnken said:
As I said earlier, 3m did double their production of n95's in January. As I'm sure other manufacturers did as well. But the hospitals are easily going through 10x what they usually would and they never have much more than a weeks supply to begin with. So even doubling production is just a drop in the bucket.
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and this.

Too late now but the only effective way would have been preventive self quarantine in my opinion.
 
Fat Trout said:
Yes, but from what I understand South Korea had a big shot across their bow with MERS in 2015. I found that interesting when I read something to the effect that certain politicians were hit really hard over the lack of reaction then. South Korea also being much closer to China....they had reason and history and scars of the past to incentivize them to act faster and sooner. The US has been sheltered from many things. That makes people, buisinesses and government complacent. The biggest thing going on in US government in December/ January was impeachment. How valuable was that in retrospect?
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We keep saying that the world is a smaller place then act like things happening overseas won't affect us... Is rather foolish... Sorry to say.

Impeachment... Yikes... Idk. Again in hindsight... Is not a good excuse.
 
Mahnken said:
As I said earlier, 3m did double their production of n95's in January. As I'm sure other manufacturers did as well. But the hospitals are easily going through 10x what they usually would and they never have much more than a weeks supply to begin with. So even doubling production is just a drop in the bucket.
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I thought I read somewhere that the US requested S Korea for medical supplies. Did S Korea just buy more stuff? I guess someone planned better?
 
Paul H said:
In my line of work, every factory I have visited has spare machinery on stand by for just the occasion. If you are saying this is not the case for PPE manufacturers... Then I have nothing to say.
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Years ago I worked for a major syringe manufacturer. In every country their manufacturing was held at 60-70%, so if an event happened to disable one country's ability to produce the syringes, the surrounding sites could easily ramp up to meet demand.
It takes a lot of capital to do this.
 
Paul H said:
We keep saying that the world is a smaller place then act like things happening overseas won't affect us... Is rather foolish... Sorry to say.

Impeachment... Yikes... Idk. Again in hindsight... Is not a good excuse.
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Agreed. Many of your questions are hindsight questions though, every one of them. It is human nature to react strongly but only after truly seeing the need, prior to that we are often (as a society) too complacent. We all do certain things because we have seen the consequences directly. We try to protect our children from falling down because we once fell down.
 
I think JIT manufacturing might be re-evaluated a bit once we're on the other side of this. Maybe things won't be cut quite so close, at least in some industries. I also hope after the dust settles we re-evaluate our reliance on overseas production. It would be nice to bring more production home, and perhaps slow or reverse our trend towards a throw-away society.

Probably wishful thinking though. Short memories will likely prevail.
 
Fat Trout said:
Agreed. Many of your questions are hindsight questions though, every one of them. It is human nature to react strongly but only after truly seeing the need, prior to that we are often (as a society) too complacent. We all do certain things because we have seen the consequences directly. We try to protect our children from falling down because we once fell down.
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Yes... All hindsight. I'm only smarter than the avg bear. 😳
But then again... History will judge in hindsight as well... I think
 
Paul H said:
In my line of work, every factory I have visited has spare machinery on stand by for just the occasion. If you are saying this is not the case for PPE manufacturers... Then I have nothing to say.
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In the past year one of our suppliers of transformers, one of the biggest suppliers around basically stopped any shipments because their single winding machine broke and it was awhile to fix. Probably a multi-million dollar machine and they only have/use one, they may keep some spare parts sure, but they must have had something major break.

One of our customers was a nut roasting plant, I believe the biggest in the North East. Their big roaster broke caused a major industry issue.

Had customers that wrapped candy for Hershey. Machine custom setup for wrapping a particular product. It broke, but caused major issues because once again, you don't keep a second unique machine laying around and you don't just call up an order a new one.
 
Paul H said:
That's what I mean. If the government got involved and said they will buy... The private sectors would have reacted. This is what happened in S Korea. The government stepped up and approached the private sector early on. That's why they did not have as much issues comparatively with testing.
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C'mon man, you can't compare a country like S. Korea with the US. 1/7 the population and half the entire country lives in the Seoul metro area.
 
Paul H said:
But then again... History will judge in hindsight as well... I think
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True. Finger pointing will ensue. Different sides will blame and we will get back to ignorance and complacency. Enough ventilators will be stockpiled to fill up a warehouse the size of Nebraska. Then we will make the same mistake again some day. Ventilators will be worthless because we needed 1 million dialysis machines or whatever for some other global issue.
 
Santapez said:
In the past year one of our suppliers of transformers, one of the biggest suppliers around basically stopped any shipments because their single winding machine broke and it was awhile to fix. Probably a multi-million dollar machine and they only have/use one, they may keep some spare parts sure, but they must have had something major break.

One of our customers was a nut roasting plant, I believe the biggest in the North East. Their big roaster broke caused a major industry issue.

Had customers that wrapped candy for Hershey. Machine custom setup for wrapping a particular product. It broke, but caused major issues because once again, you don't keep a second unique machine laying around and you don't just call up an order a new one.
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Exactly, and parts for those machines are all custom made on demand because the supplier can't afford to fully stock custom made parts for each customers. This kind of circles back to Italy, as a lot of producers of automated production systems are small companies located in the area of Northen Italy that is most affected by the CV right now.
 
Fat Trout said:
True. Finger pointing will ensue. Different sides will blame and we will get back to ignorance and complacency. Enough ventilators will be stockpiled to fill up a warehouse the size of Nebraska. Then we will make the same mistake again some day. Ventilators will be worthless because we needed 1 million dialysis machines or whatever for some other global issue.
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This is SARS #2... Or 3... Or whatever no?
Eh....
 
Patrick said:
not a priori, no. that would be impossible. But there has to be some forward thinkers out there that
can put something out without the worry of litigation(meaning exemption) in an attempt to save some people in the short term -
as in start two weeks ago, and be pumping them out this week.

Not a simple problem, but we have smart people. were they caught off guard too?
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Yeah, smart people were caught off guard....we became complacent on a lot of levels. A lot of folks only operate in their own silo. This was a wake up call. What will we do? Stay tuned. Hopefully we do better as a society.
 
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