It's probably not surprising to anyone who knows how industrial production works, but to a layman like me it's really surprising how hard it seems to be to produce more suitable masks in a short time. I didn't expect the supply chain and machines for such simple products to be that complex and hard to set up.
That's what happens when manufacturing is outsource to China. They were able to ramp up by 20x and produce 200 million mask per day. As a comparison, 3M makes 300 million per year and said they will increase by 30%.
I have no clue about softer materials, but setting up the tooling for making the simplest of plastic parts is a multi-step process where each step takes weeks. And, for roughly the same reasons as in software development, making that shorter is likely to be both expensive and drop some quality. With medical equipment you generally don't want to drop quality. So, if making these masks is any similar to the only industrial process I know about, we might have the needed capacity just in time for the autumn rebound.
Not surprising at all. First off you need screens, molds, and other one-per-machine equipment that has to be fully custom to whatever product you want to build. When expedited, these things can still take a week or more to create.
From there you need to assemble a pipeline and do an enormous amount of tuning. Your first runs are generally going to completely unusable products because of a large number of mistakes in the manufacturing process. It takes time (also generally weeks) to find all the places where errors are happening and make the appropriate adjustments.
When you are making 10,000 (or more) of something per day, no product is "simple".
