Re:How did the U.S. end up with nurses wearing garbage bags?
by makomk on Friday April 10, 2020 @05:04AM
(#22831234)
The trouble is, whilst that 3M surge capacity might be enough to handle something like a slighly worse SARS or MERS, it doesn't seem to be adequate to deal with a once-in-100-years pandemic like this one - and it'd take a hell of a lot more surge capacity with much worse utilization to make that possible.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-25/3m-double...
This is 3M’s moment, one for which the staid, 118-year-old Minnesota manufacturing giant—the maker of Post-its, Scotch tape, touchscreen displays, and scores of other products—has been preparing for almost two decades. Coming out of the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, the company realized it wasn’t fully equipped to handle unexpected explosions of demand in the event of a crisis, or what it calls an “X factor.” It decided to build surge capacity into its respirator factories around the world.
And with terrorist groups and state actors realizing that animal viruses are potent biological weapons, and legitimate research centers working on making viruses airborne - chances of another screeching halt in the next 10 years due to malice or incompetence are not that low.