The last time we had a pandemic like this was 100 years ago. Do you honestly believe we'd maintain unused factories for that long and then start manufacturing modern medical equipment with century old technology?
No. We will update them from time to time. And of course we had three close calls in the latest 20 years - sars, mers and ebola. And btw - this is literally what 3M did with the N95 masks - they had spare production lines that turned on in a heartbeat
This is 3M’s moment, one for which the staid, 118-year-old Minnesota manufacturing giant—the maker of Post-its, Scotch tape, touchscreen displays, and scores of other products—has been preparing for almost two decades. Coming out of the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, the company realized it wasn’t fully equipped to handle unexpected explosions of demand in the event of a crisis, or what it calls an “X factor.” It decided to build surge capacity into its respirator factories around the world.
And with terrorist groups and state actors realizing that animal viruses are potent biological weapons, and legitimate research centers working on making viruses airborne - chances of another screeching halt in the next 10 years due to malice or incompetence are not that low.
The trouble is, whilst that 3M surge capacity might be enough to handle something like a slighly worse SARS or MERS, it doesn't seem to be adequate to deal with a once-in-100-years pandemic like this one - and it'd take a hell of a lot more surge capacity with much worse utilization to make that possible.
There are other reasons to maintain domestic emergency capacity. We're still a bunch of apes living on a hostile rock. Except we also have war machines.
