Besides being Apple's CEO, Tim Cook is also possibly the best supply chain guy on the planet (that's why he became Apple's CEO). I was hoping he would get involved with pandemic supply chain issues, and now he has.
Apple Faceshield
511–520 of 663 posts
Re: Apple Faceshield
#512As I read this post for the Apple Face Shield on support.apple.com, my girlfriend looked over my shoulder and said "Hmm. Well, it has a better keyboard than the MacBook Pro." I thought this was too funny not to share.
That’s a great spin on an old classic: https://xkcd.com/528/
Re: Apple Faceshield
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very simple to just put up a full shield between the clerk and the customers, you don't need to strap the shield to people's faces when there's a static point of contact.
This has the benefit of preventing you from touching your face after touching things customers have touched.
If you're a retail worker and you haven't trained yourself to not touch your face while in work mode, I don't know what to tell you. Be better?
Re: Apple Faceshield
#514Does anyone know of a central repo for these designs? Not just the face shields, but the masks, the intubation boxes, the ventilator tubes, etc? Also, is there a way that hospitals can make an 'order/ask'? Like: we need 5 ventilator splitters. There is this tremendous spirit and untapped generousity, but blind donating isn't the best, nor is getting a bunch of supplies that don't work. Anyone trying to coordinate all…
Re: Apple Faceshield
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
> starting doses likely matter as well. That is something that I've been wondering about too. I work in biotech but not as a scientist. These things are tricky to nail down as they seem to be very individual specific. Theoretically, in an exponential growth model, it wouldn't matter if you were inoculated with 20000 or 200000 virons, after the incubation period post-infection, you're going to be generating a huge amo…
Viral dose does indeed matter. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/coronavirus-viral... It’s analogous to containing a new virus outbreak before it becomes an exponentially growing pandemic.
Thanks for taking the time to post the link, but it wasn't convincing as it lacked data and other relevant scientific information that I was looking for. Personally, I do not consider the NYT to a reliable source of information, but I know many do so maybe the link will help someone else.
Re: Apple Faceshield
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that with great confidence and a lack of sources; and I'm guessing we are equally ignorant on the actual physics of how small droplets move. The details aren't clear on how the virus is spreading. The virus might have multiple modes of transmission. Closing 2 of them reliably a great deal. There are important things to do with "catching COVID" that aren't binary; starting doses likely matter as well. I'd rath…
> starting doses likely matter as well. That is something that I've been wondering about too. I work in biotech but not as a scientist. These things are tricky to nail down as they seem to be very individual specific. Theoretically, in an exponential growth model, it wouldn't matter if you were inoculated with 20000 or 200000 virons, after the incubation period post-infection, you're going to be generating a huge amo…
It could give your immune system an extra day or two to produce antibodies before it get overwhelmed.
Re: Apple Faceshield
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was hoping everyone in the US might be able to buy one. Ideally, they'd be cheap enough for municipalities to buy and distribute.
Face shields make sense in clinical settings, but do they make much sense for casual use? It's hard enough to get people to wear masks.
The Dutch police is now free to use them as spit masks. Unfortunately there are people who like to spit and cough in the faces of the police (and then being charged with weeks in jail).
But I doubt it will work well against coughing because the airflow can just go around it.
LaVision had this great visualisation about the coughing airflow: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kYJvU81DKgk
Re: Apple Faceshield
#518Context: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/5/21209270/apple-face-shield... “Our first shipment was delivered to Kaiser hospital facilities in the Santa Clara Valley this past week, and the feedback from doctors was very positive,” Cook says. “These pack flat, one hundred per box. Each shield is assembled in less than two minutes and is fully adjustable. We’re sourcing materials and manufacturing in the US and China.” A…
Thank you! I had missed this news, so a link to a support article with no explanation was a little mystifying.
They're donating a million face shields by the end of the week to hospitals and medical facilities with the greatest need, and 20m by the end of the month, designed by Apple and sourced via their existing supply chain.
Re: Apple Faceshield
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the point of 3d printing something that clearly needs to be mass-produced in great quantities? Maybe it "feels good", but it's just too slow. I'm honestly not sure why people don't just use plastic food wrap as a cheap improvised alternative for face shields. It's lightweight, readily available, disposable, fits over any attire and does not restrict visibility.
3d printing is probably less effective than manufacturing at scale, but it has much lower setup time and overhead cost. Not to mention, this escalated demand for masks and face shields is going to be very short - 1 or 2 years at most. Setting up a whole factory to fulfill only a year or two of demand is not effective. By comparison, you can use your 3d printer for other stuff after the pandemic is over.
There are factories that specialize in small batches. Just some quick searching seemed to suggest that you could be getting O(1000) parts a day at a cost of a few thousand dollars (for the initial setup) plus a few dollars a part [1]. I'd imagine that the lead time is a few weeks rather than days, but if there's already a stable design wouldn't this be the best bet?
Re: Apple Faceshield
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If those projectiles are aerosolized and are in the air that you breathe It seems like you're imagining that the mucus and saliva particles would behave like a gas, but it's a suspension of liquid particles in the air, which behaves slightly differently. Think of breathing onto glass -- a lot of the aerosol I expel adheres to the glass. Some smaller droplets may move around it, but it's still preferable to receive…
>but it's still preferable to receive a smaller dose of the virus. Could you explain why you believe that? I haven't found anything definitive on this topic.
[I'm no microbiology expert, so obviously take this with a grain of salt :-).]
I'm not sure whether the initial dose affects the severity of the disease, but it seems clear that it at least affects the probability of infection. The individual action hypothesis [1] posits that each individual pathogen has an independent chance of infecting a host, i.e.
P(no infection | n pathogens) = P(no infection | single pathogen)^n
I don't know how accurate the IAH model is, but there seems to be a good amount of evidence that infection rates are at least positively correlated with dose, e.g. [2].
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.200...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2869824/pdf/120...