Ohio Batelle mask cleaning technology — follow up
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Back in late March/early April, there was this topic on which @Mik started a thread in Tapatalk TNCR. News reporting at the time went something like this:
The gist of the story at the time was that the Ohio company Batelle claimed to have a technology/machine that can sanitize 80k N95 masks per day so they can be reused, and DeWine complained that the FDA was too slow to approve their nationwide sales and deployment, appealed to Trump, and Trump got the FDA to expedite approval. Government contracts followed.
This is a follow up to that story: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-administration-paying-huge-premium-mask-cleaning-machines-which-don-n1210896
- The federal Coronavirus task force thought they were going to get a cleaning technology that would allow an N95 mask to be reused 20 times. Turns out they could only reuse a mask 4 times. Performance wise, the achievable results is only 20% of expectation. Nurses are afraid to reuse them.
- The task force thought they will get 60 such machines for $60million, about $1 million a piece. But now the price has ballooned to anywhere between $413 and $600 million. So the price has went up anywhere between 670% to 1000%.
In short, we’re paying something like 7x~10x the originally expected price for 1/5 of the originally expected benefits.
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https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062018v2.full.pdf
It’s not all “anonymous.” That’s publicly available preprint of an NIH study showing that the technology is only good enough to let an N95 mask be reused three times.
It made news at the time, prominent elected officials made it a point to intervene and expedited certain approval and procurement processes. It certainly makes sense to follow up to check the results to see whether it works out or not.
Would certainly be good to know how many machines got deployed, how many N95 get effectively processed/reused, how much of a dent it has made in actually solving the N95 mask shortage issue, get some idea of real world ROI, basic accountability, that sort of thing.
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Will get right on that just as soon as we finish counting ventilators.
The Brad
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Reuse x4 beats the heck out what we were doing. You got issued one N95 and a brown paper sack to keep it in.
“Cry havoc and let slip the DOGE of war!”
Those who cheered as J-6 American prisoners were locked in solitary for 18 months without trial, now suddenly fight tooth and nail for foreign terrorists’ "due process". — Buck Sexton
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Reuse x4 beats the heck out what we were doing. You got issued one N95 and a brown paper sack to keep it in.
@Jolly said in Ohio Batelle mask cleaning technology — follow up:
Reuse x4 beats the heck out what we were doing. You got issued one N95 and a brown paper sack to keep it in.
How does an N95 mask wear out? Anybody know?
I could understand that the microfibres allow the holes where air flows through to become larger as a person breathes in and out, that would make sense. So how effective are the masks after a couple of hours, 4 hours, the end of an 8-hour shift?
I need $400,000 quickly, to throw masks into water, then into a dryer where they shrink a bit, and all the little holes get all tight and stuff. I guarantee they will be just as effective as when I first throw them into our Maytag. Look at the money we'd save. Big D, cut the red tape for me, would'ya bud?
Another fine solution from Rainman Labs, Inc.
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Will get right on that just as soon as we finish counting ventilators.
@LuFins-Dad said in Ohio Batelle mask cleaning technology — follow up:
Will get right on that just as soon as we finish counting ventilators.
On the ventilator front, lots of touted “innovations” have also found to not pan out. For example, the “splitting” or sharing of ventilator across multiple patients, Dyson’s foray into inventing/making ventilators, Elon Musk’s foray into the same. Also contracting mishaps like this, and this.
So, yeah, there is quite a bit of accounting and follow-up reporting on what ventilator “innovations” failed to live up to expectations. This thread looks at the same concerning N95 masks.
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Reuse x4 beats the heck out what we were doing. You got issued one N95 and a brown paper sack to keep it in.
@Jolly said in Ohio Batelle mask cleaning technology — follow up:
Reuse x4 beats the heck out what we were doing. You got issued one N95 and a brown paper sack to keep it in.
Indeed, thought from your writing, it looks like the Batelle technology, even one that only meets the lower “4x reuse” expectation, hasn’t make it to your corner of the woods yet. It seems healthcare providers across the whole country are still struggling to get enough supplies of N95 masks.
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The other thing that article does not provide is what went into the eventual cost. Sure, the machine may cost $1 million. How about supplies? People to run it? Overhead to gather, track, treat and return the masks to their owners? How many machines were purchased?
It's just another hit piece. History tells us in the midst of an emergency you take some long shots. See the Doolittle raid.
