Yesterday, I spend a large part of the day in search of N95 masks. No retail stores have them. Amazon has them but will only sell them to front-line workers. After hours of online searching I finally found a sketchy and perhaps pirated site where I ordered 10 of them for $168, probably 10 times what they cost to produce. Who knows if they will actually be shipped or if I will ever receive them.
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best solutions, and we may have missed an obvious one with this pandemic. Science continues to conclude that face masks are the best way to prevent community spread, and a recent Duke University study confirms that the N95 mask is the best one both for protecting those who wear it and protecting those around them.
My question is: Why are these masks, inexpensive to make and proven to be the best protection against the virus, so hard to find? And that question leads to some broader related questions and observations.
When we add up the amounts being spent for everything from research to stimulus packages, the total will approach $10 trillion in this country alone, an almost unimaginable number. For less than $1 billion, which is one ten thousandth of $10 trillion, we could produce enough N95 masks to give one (or two or three) to every man, woman and child in this country.
If we can gear up and accomplish the difficult and complex production of thousands of respirators, for tens of thousands of dollars apiece, why can’t we gear up and do the much simpler production of millions of N95 masks for a few dollars apiece? It is a classic case of too much emphasis (and money) on reacting and responding and too little attention to preparing and preventing.
I know that this is completely politically incorrect to say, but the toll and the number of lives lost in this world from hunger, extreme poverty and the other effects of the worldwide economic crisis brought about by closing down such large portions of so many of the world’s economies will be far higher than those killed by the disease. In India alone, it is estimated that 100 million people will fall into extreme poverty (trying to live on less than $2 a day) because of the shutdown there.
Of course, we should all be shocked and worried about the 200,000 Americans who will die from the virus, but it will be a tiny fraction of those who will die of starvation across the world because of closed economies.
And our daughter, who works with AmeriCorps, tells us that the educational or learning gap between middle class and poor children, already wide, is getting wider every day as the kids who have the computers and support to learn from home separate themselves further and further from kids who don’t.
In the future, with hindsight, we may realize that the world would have been better off if we had gone to every possible length to protect the elderly and those who are most vulnerable because of health conditions (including, for starters, being sure they all had N95 masks) and left everything else alone. If we had kept economies and schools open but mandated masks and social distancing, we could have avoided the economic, educational and poverty consequences that will plague the world for the next decade.
Sweden is the country that came closest to taking this approach, leaving schools and businesses open and focusing on protecting the elderly, but they did not require masks or encourage social distancing as much as they could have, and their results are mixed, though they claim to be ahead of the rest of the world in developing “herd immunity.”
I don’t blame anyone for overreacting or for failing to see a simpler, more limited approach, because hindsight, unlike foresight, is always 20/20. But despite being mired in expensive, extensive, broad and long-term-devastating shutdowns, can’t we still do the simple things we failed to do at the beginning? Again I ask, where are the N95 masks?!
For nearly 10 years, Richard and Linda Eyre wrote a weekly column in the Deseret News. They now comment periodically with opinion pieces.