[ponyfleisch]

For people who are of the opinion that expensive preparation for low probability events is untenable for elected governments because it would be seen as wasteful:

My home country (Switzerland) has a conscription army. ~160k people, each with either a pistol or an assault rifle at home, receiving regular training for a few weeks a year while the government compensates their employer for the loss in productivity. There are tanks, fighter jets and massive alpine fortifications. It's expensive. Most countries have an army and they are usually sized for an unlikely worst case scenario.

One would think maintaining a stockpile of PPE that would allow the authorities to recommend (and even provide) masks for the general population without risking a shortage in health care would be a relatively minor expense compared to that. And yet, all over the western world, PPE is in short supply, and that is without the general public wearing masks like they do in many asian countries.

[rhino369]

The bigger question is why we rely solely on disposable PPE for catastrophes. Instead of N95, they should be using P100 masks that can be cleaned and whose filters last a couple months in a hospital setting.

They should have gowns that can be boiled and reused.

Surgical masks that can be boiled, etc.

Disposable PPE is used for convenience. It's easier and cheaper to throw away an N95 mask than to clean an P100 mask, except when you can't buy N95 masks.

[nickff]

The problem is not cleaning. The problems are design, donning, doffing, and tracking.

If you have re-usable gear, you have to make VERY sure that what you think is clean is really clean. That means cleaning procedures have to be extremely thorough, and you have to make sure that you NEVER mistake a soiled unit for a clean one. In addition to designing things to be clean-able (which is much harder than it sounds), you need to make sure that they are designed in such a manner that they can be doffed safely. Taking off PPE sounds easy, but when you are guaranteed to come into contact with biohazards, you have to be extremely careful about how and what you do.

Simply put; desiging, manufacturing, and safely using re-usable PPE for use in biohazardous environments is much harder than it sounds.

[rodgerd]

Military spending often operates on a loophole in this sort of thinking; but also Switzerland also appears, from the outside, to be a nation comfortable with the idea that collective action is a good idea (perhaps a lack of Murdoch media or Koch-style billionaires?), while in the English-speaking world we've seen a thirty to forty year assault on the Kensyian consensus that rebuilt Western Europe after WW II, towards a culture of aggressive individualism, to the exent one British cabinet minister describes himself as a "neo-Victorian".