91–100 of 584 posts
I hope companies step up and create surgical masks. It's such a basic item, but we don't have enough. Forget about guns, it's like asking troops to fight without shoes.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/trump-say...
If we were halfway rational, we would have started this in January. Failing that, start now.
Have you ever been in an executive leadership position that required you to make tough decisions? As someone who recently has entered this realm, let me tell you: most of the decisions in front of you are essentially choices between a whole bunch of options that all have one thing in common: they totally suck. You learn quickly that you are going to make harmful decisions because sometimes a good option isn’t in the…
Instead, we got 2 months of "it's nothing".
One of the roles of leadership is to persuade a significant percentage of the population that threats are real and cooperate. The current US leadership utterly failed at this.
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At the risk of being argumentative I would point out that many Americans died unnecessarily at the beginning of WWII as well. This is a common pattern in wars.
I think you can take this analogy too far. If I were to do so, I'd say that the OP is suggesting that Pearl Harbor was attacked, the President said it was no big deal, just one Japanese plane, and the country collectively twiddled their thumbs while the enemy advanced.
Not sure why everything is always compared to a war in any case? We have a war on this, a war on that. You can compare anything to a war, but that doesn't mean you're going to get useful insights out of the exercise.
I mean, yeah, I suppose it's Pearl Harbor is attacked and we twiddled our thumbs, but what insights useful right now in dealing with this virus does that comparison uncover? It's kind of just noise at this point. Save it for the post-mortem and the history books. It's not terribly useful right now. And it's certainly not useful to tell Americans at this point that it's necessary and common that many of them will need to die unnecessarily because, "that's always the way".
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That's an overstatement of what he said. He had been posting about possible medical treatments [1], which is why the tweet you linked to starts with "That said" before talking about panicking and redirecting medical resources away from people who need it. Do you know why? The drug he was posting about before that tweet, `chloroquine`, is already facing shortages around the globe for people already on it for non-COVID…
He also literally said "The coronavirus panic is dumb": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528
Regarding that tweet, the only pass it was from March 6 (maybe, but probably not, best not to say anything early on). Even our Canadian gov spent the last month or so saying "there's no scientific evidence supporting border closure" [1], including in comments by our health minister a few days before they indeed closed all of Canada's borders. Nearly every person getting diagnosed w/ COVID-19 in Ontario has traveled recently, even the cases from today [2].
Nothing wrong with being wrong and later being educated on the seriousness - Elon seems to have changed his tune recently which is good. A concept that is frequently lost in our social media outrage machine. Not everyone is wise enough to not make public statements with such certainty, even our well-educated health ministers... meanwhile panic buying TP didn't do anyone any good either.
[1] https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2020/03/12/after-tr...
[2] https://www.ontario.ca/page/2019-novel-coronavirus#section-0 (note: how travel + country name is next to almost every case, even well into March 18th)
Meanwhile, actual ventilator manufacturers are not getting many orders: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/18/ventilator-...
I'd like to think that at least some auto workers already have some taste of working under the eye of regulators and auditors and as such their adjustment to GMP has the potential to be smooth. The days of leaving empty beverage containers in the hollow of a door are long past, right?
Management that is not experienced in FDA regulations will try to ignore or short-cut them. In the best of cases, this turns into fines and manufacturing delays. In the worst of cases, it turns into deaths due to defective product or manufacturing delays. Every level of management needs to be experienced in GxP.
The most reasonable path to getting a QMS in place and having compliant manufacturing would seem to be to have the manufacturing capacity be leant to an established manufacturer that has a solid QMS, the expertise to adapt it to the new reality, and a solid relationship with the FDA. That is, the auto manufacturer's management would need to be out of the picture or 100% subservient to the experienced medical device manufacturer.
Once that is worked out, I suspect that manufacture of the devices is comparatively easy. Put another way, it's probably easier to switch from sedans to tanks than it is to switch from SUVs to almost any medical gizmo.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_manufacturing_practice 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_management_system 3. https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
This is what Musk should be doing.
Elon Musk does not owe people anything. If he decides to produce them, that's fine, but he doesn't have to. But the governments should buy these ventilators from private companies, so private companies like Tesla or GM were incentivized to produce these ventilators. Edit: added and then removed a comment about downvotes
What they need is approval and guidance from the government, that's where the failure is. Notice there's still no reply taking up GM on their offer.
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the correct response should look like an overreaction in hindsight. But it's tough to explain the cost of the overreaction if said overreaction prevented all of these problems. I make the analogy with an engineer receiving accolades for fixing bugs and outages with heroic effort. But the engineer that creates trouble free code, that never has any problems, but takes a long time to create code that's bug free seems to…
Yes, it probably will look like an overreaction, but that doesn't provide carte-blanche to overreact every time there's a new virus. As GP mentioned, this happens every few years. Most of the time, it fizzles out. We can't transition all production to hospital equipment every few years, even if it is the right call twice a century. I have often reprimanded (and have in turn been reprimanded) for overengineering a sol…
If that's OK, why not do that for health related issues too?
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I think they work in gloves ( https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/26/18744304/c... for the picture).
a factory full of people using gloves and alcohol sanitizers will spread the virus unless the people are trained and experienced in sterile technique.
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Musk thinks it’s hype https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1239756900255903744
That's an overstatement of what he said. He had been posting about possible medical treatments [1], which is why the tweet you linked to starts with "That said" before talking about panicking and redirecting medical resources away from people who need it. Do you know why? The drug he was posting about before that tweet, `chloroquine`, is already facing shortages around the globe for people already on it for non-COVID…