61–70 of 97 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like pretty irresponsible to keep them until up until the government said they are gonna confiscate them.
Source on "the government said they are gonna confiscate them"?
Why was Facebook stashing so many masks? Anyway, if they didn't donate them, the Goverment said they are gonna confiscate them, and this was already clear.
FTA: “To help, Facebook donated our emergency reserve of 720,000 masks that we had bought in case the wildfires continued,” Zuckerberg said in a post
It seems many companies, prudently, had stocks of masks for their employees. Mastercard donated 25k masks and Goldman Sachs 20k[1]. My question is why the US government didn't have a bigger stockpile of them? We treat national security products with such deference, but yet defense against pandemics has been an afterthought. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/financial-institutions-share-st...
The first story reports the loss of 50,000 state and local health officials.
The second from Mar 2020, reported that the SNS 'currently holds about 30 million simple surgical masks and 12 million of the more protective N95 masks....' Compare those numbers to what's needed.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/27/4830698...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/14/8141218...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source on "the government said they are gonna confiscate them"?
Just watch their update from today. Their said: "If you have a stash of masks, we'll be knocking on your door."
Also: the Facebook story is from Sunday. It’s not very likely that it is a reaction to a press conference on Monday, is it?
You and all the other Trump supporters should stop making stuff up and/or learn to link to sources at least after being asked repeatedly to provide them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're wearing an n95 mask for particulate pollution there isn't a particular reason why you can't reuse it. When I heard the numbers, I figured they purchased extra so they could also supply them to the surrounding community so as to avoid drama about facebook employees having masks while few others did.
I mean, they're good for 8-10 hours, but they don't last indefinitely.
In this situation, you assume the mask catches particles containing coronavirus. The mask becomes a biohazard pretty quickly. They could probably be safely disinfected and reused.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is enough for 14 days for ~50,000 people at 1/day. It seems like huge overkill when stated as a single number, but two weeks is a reasonable amount to plan for, especially for reserves at a time when the supply chain is stressed. I wish our hospitals' administration had as much foresight. I think this crisis is making it clear that management in health care is vastly overpaid.
>I wish our hospitals' administration had as much foresight. I think this crisis is making it clear that management in health care is vastly overpaid. Facebook has just a tad bit more money to prepare for these remote possibilities compared with your average hospital. Plus hospitals have to justify every cost in relation to how many lives it will save. Is prepping for a once in a century pandemic going to save more l…
It isn’t a “remote” possibility that facebook employees end up needing respirators since it isn’t a “remote” possibility that there will be wildfires again in California this year. That is what is expected to happen.
Although it’s hard to tell what will be the impact of the global shut-downs reducing greenhouse gases on global temperatures this summer (if that will even have any impact so soon).
A note for those critical about donations not coming sooner: It is important to understand hospitals and doctors could not legally use industrial N95 masks. No hospital could accept them without exposing themselves to massive litigation. I know this sounds stupid from outside the US. Sadly, this is part of our reality. The key that unlocked donations was President Trump. Upon learning of this restriction he quickly p…
> It is important to realize that the US healthcare system does not have an insurance problem. Politicians would have you think this is the case. As an outsider from New Zealand, I completely believe your insurance system is a huge problem, and that belief is founded on the problems I see (not what your politicians say, I don’t know anything about them). One major issue is linking insurance to your job. Lose your job…
However, this isn't really the top problem on the list. It definitely is one of the last items, if not the last.
Allow me to make a simple, yet imperfect, parallel.
If you buy a Toyota your auto insurance will cost X.
If, on the other hand, you buy a Ferrari, it will cost many times more than X.
Why?
Because a Ferrari costs more to repair and the probability of accidents might be statistically higher given the extra power, etc.
Insurance costs are a result of statistical analysis of the underlying probability distribution of costs to the insurance company based on a range of factors. These would include known and unknown costs, personal history, regional factors, legislation and more.
One cannot magically reduce the cost of insurance and obtain better results on the other end. You cannot force insurance to cover the potential costs of a Ferrari to only cost as much as it does for a Toyota. You can only do that if you remove coverage. For example, you are not covered if the car is stolen, damage or if you are driving above the speed limit and you are required to install a monitoring device in the car. In other words, make the potential cost surface as equivalent as that of a Toyota.
This is why the US does not have an insurance problem and our healthcare system will never be fixed through insurance. This "Medicare for All" nonsense is exactly that. It's like forcing Ferrari insurance down to Toyota level. In other words, it turns a blind eye to the underlying structural issues in the system, fixes nothing and pretends it is a solution.
Lower insurance costs in the US is a theoretically simple task that, in practice, is difficult due to our politics. We have to reduce costs. And these costs are related to the regulatory burden, the financial reality of lawsuits and the cost of medical education, to name three factors.
When you are rolled into an operating room in the US and are surrounded by, say, ten professionals, their collective school loan debt is likely in the two to three million dollar range. They each spend tens of thousands of dollars a year in insurance to protect from lawsuits. Each of the pieces of equipment in that room, from the masks to the ventilators, endoscopes, scalpels, table and more are the result of having spent from millions to billions of dollars in regulatory licensing and testing. Each of the companies making these products must maintain teams of attorneys, entire floors full of them in some cases, to protect against lawsuits. They must also pay for insurance for the same reason. The hospital in which this operating room exists is also the subject of pretty intense regulations that start with the planning and construction of the building and the rooms. The permits alone to build a hospital can cost a hundred million dollars and take ten years to obtain. Once built, the hospital is subject to yet another layer of cost-increasing regulations (the current example of not being able to use industrial N95 masks is relevant here) and must carry insurance to protect itself an its entire staff from lawsuits (which could cost billions of dollars).
That is a super simplified view in to the innards of the US healthcare system. None of these costs and problems are magically fixed by changing insurance, no matter what we do. We can take it away from employers. Sure. So what? How does it change any of the above? We can make it this crazy "Medicare for All". So what? How does it change the realities I disclosed above?
No, insurance isn't our problem. Sure, it could be better. Yet it is pointless to even talk about making insurance changes when the underlying cost structure is massively broken.
I hope this clarifies things for you. I understand it isn't easy to understand the inner workings of something like this from afar. I only understand the way things are in other countries because I have lived elsewhere, otherwise it would be hard to grok the differences.
A note for those critical about donations not coming sooner: It is important to understand hospitals and doctors could not legally use industrial N95 masks. No hospital could accept them without exposing themselves to massive litigation. I know this sounds stupid from outside the US. Sadly, this is part of our reality. The key that unlocked donations was President Trump. Upon learning of this restriction he quickly p…
When I think about the reasons the cost of US healthcare is so high, over-legislation is definitely up there, but so is the arms race between insurance and healthcare providers. It seems to me that the hight cost just is a symptom, and that we should focus our efforts on deregulation so that we drive prices down to competitive levels.
Rather than repeat things here, please read the comment I just posted here:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I wish our hospitals' administration had as much foresight. I think this crisis is making it clear that management in health care is vastly overpaid. Facebook has just a tad bit more money to prepare for these remote possibilities compared with your average hospital. Plus hospitals have to justify every cost in relation to how many lives it will save. Is prepping for a once in a century pandemic going to save more l…
This isn’t a remote possibility. The California wildfires were real. People were wearing N95 masks last year due to the wildfires. There was even a famous article about a couple who had their engagement pictures taken wearing N95 masks due to the california wildfires, which you could see in the background of the photos. And since global warming is actually a real thing, we could project more wildfires for this year.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTA: “To help, Facebook donated our emergency reserve of 720,000 masks that we had bought in case the wildfires continued,” Zuckerberg said in a post
We're not talking 70K masks, we're talking 720K! These masks have an expiration date. I want them to publish their purchase documents! I won't be surprised if they bought them back in February like possibly many other corporations and that's why we ended up with no masks.