Factories rush to make more masks amid coronavirus. Here’s why they’re so hard to make
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all Americans should wear face masks in public to prevent asymptomatic carriers and others from spreading the coronavirus.
The CDC even issued guidelines on how to make your own face masks in an effort to save the more protective N95 respirator masks for healthcare workers. But as the coronavirus pandemic extends its reach across the world, officials have said there aren’t enough masks to meet demands — especially those for heatlhcare workers.
In February, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the U.S. would need an estimated 300 million N95 masks, but the country only had 30 million in stockpile, according to CNBC.
The struggle to meet the global demand for quality masks has many layers, starting with the rare material that the masks are made of, according to NPR. The melt-blown fabric is a “fine mesh of synthetic polymer fibers that forms the critical inner filtration layer of a mask,” NPR reported.
“The supply chain has gotten nuts for this particular material,” Nozi Hamidi, vice president of marketing and business development for SWM International, one of around two dozen manufacturers of melt-blown material, told CBS. “We experienced this when SARS happened 17 or so years ago, but not to this extent. This is just absolutely insane.”
Other contributing factors include the availability and cost of machines to make the masks.
The mask-making machines cost around $4.23 million each. The machines make the fabric by melting down plastic material and creating flat sheets of fabric for the masks, according to NPR.
Quality control also comes into play, manufacturers said.
“You need to stretch these fibers by hot air, and [the air] needs to be in perfect condition over the width of the machine. The biggest dilemma is that many of the machines are not producing consistent quality,” Markus Müller, the sales director at German company Reicofil told NPR.
N95 masks need to be approved by the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the Food and Drug Administration, according to Vox.
Mike Bowen, executive vice president of Texas mask manufacturer Prestige Ameritech, told WIRED that there has been increased demand for N95 respirators and other protective gear at his company. Mask production has ramped up to 1 million masks a day, he said.
But it’s not nearly enough, he said.
“Since February 1, we’ve had to turn down orders for 100 million masks or more a day on average,” Bowen told WIRED. “Sometimes, we turn down 200 million or 300 million [masks] a day. It’s kind of surreal.”
Companies are also struggling to make more masks because they can’t just go out and buy more machines, Dave Rousse, president of INDA, the Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry, told CBS.
“There are only five or six companies across the globe that make these machines, and they’re not inexpensive. These are sizable machines, a lot of technology, a lot of air handling, a lot of electronics, a lot of precision moving parts,” Rousse told CBS. “Normally it’s nine to 12 months before you could get a machine delivery.”
This story was originally published April 17, 2020 at 7:04 PM with the headline "Factories rush to make more masks amid coronavirus. Here’s why they’re so hard to make."