Many Americans are making face shields which can be washed and disinfected by hand
BEFORE THE pandemic, John-Paul Kaminski was a retired cross-country coach and middle-school technology teacher in Dobbs Ferry, a village about 15 miles up the Hudson from Manhattan, who liked to tinker with his 3D printer at home. He used it to make key chains, jewellery boxes, maze games and the occasional carved pumpkin. These days, he and other tech teachers he knows from university use their printers—60 in all—to make head- and chin-straps that hold plastic face-shields in place.
One reason so many people have turned to face shields, explains Paul Mirel, a Baltimore-based maker, is that shields have the least need to be sterile, and “they’re easiest to manufacture”. Rubber gloves require a complex extrusion process. Surgical masks and N95 masks require polypropylene fibre and strenuous testing. Ventilators are complex machines that require rigorous disinfection before use and a respiratory therapist to manage.
Getting more of them into the supply chain will not just help front-line workers. It could also help ordinary people feel more secure about being in crowds and taking public transport, which are essential if cities are to return to something approaching normal levels of productivity before a vaccine becomes widely available.
Mr Holman knows that “there’s no way that this is more cost- or labour-efficient than making it in a giant factory, but when all the giant factories are in China and China needs all the face shields domestically, it just exposes the yawning gap in America’s industrial space.
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