National Post (National Edition)
Inside the MAD RUSH to make masks to fight VIRUS
The task of making the protective gear is turning out to be more complicated
In a normal April, in a normal year, Bob Preston might be found strolling through the campus of McMaster University, or lingering in a coffee shop, working out project ideas on a pad of paper. Classes would have ended on schedule, students would be studying for exams and for engineering professors like Preston, “the pressure would be off,” he said.
But that was before COVID-19 ripped through populations in Asia, Europe and now North America, exposing gaping shortages of the masks, gowns and other equipment needed to treat patients and protect health-care workers battling the virus.
In this strange season, Preston finds himself steering a team of McMaster engineers working “24/7” to churn out a product that up until two weeks ago they had no expertise in: masks. It’s a task that has turned out to be a great deal more complicated than he initially thought.
“A mask is not just a piece of fabric you put over your face,” said Preston. “In the medical context it’s a highly regulated device. So we’re all being forced to stretch into new areas and work in ways we haven’t before, but we do have the skills and we’re learning very quickly.”
More than 11 million face masks arrived in Canada in recent days, including a shipment of one million masks delivered to a Hamilton warehouse, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday.
Yet as the virus spreads, supply gaps emerge and mask-wearing recommendations evolve – the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to soon advise that all Americans wear face coverings in public — pressure is mounting for Canadian firms to manufacture personal protective equipment (or PPE) here at home.
If mask wearing becomes widespread in North America — as it is in Asia — billions of more masks could be required, experts say, making mass manufacturing crucial.
For the moment, Canada is one of many countries scouring international markets for the equipment needed to shield health care workers from a virus that has already infected more than a million people and killed more than 51,000.
Amid surging demand, those attempts are increasingly frustrated by both shortages and export controls — the measures imposed by countries to ban or curb the sale of goods to foreign buyers.
Since the beginning of the year, 76 countries have imposed formal or informal export bans on critical medical equipment and PPE — 57 of them in March alone, according to tracking by Simon Evenett, professor of international trade and economic development, University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.
“These are countries that have made the calculation that they don’t want any of this leaving their country so they’re grabbing onto it,” Evenett said. “The bans started off in China then moved to their neighbours, Taiwan and Korea. Then, as the virus moved west, the bans moved west. So we ended up with pretty much all the Eurasian continent covered with them by the end of last week.”
By this week, export bans had emerged in African countries, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil.
The one continent that has yet to announce any restrictions is North America, he notes.
Nevertheless, fears of hospitals being overwhelmed by a wave of infected patients have prompted Trudeau to call for a nationwide mobilization of industry to make PPE and crucial medical devices such as ventilators.
Overnight it seems, garment manufacturers, packaging suppliers and auto parts makers have all turned their attention to goods that were once the domain of specialty medical suppliers.
“We’re not putting all our eggs on the other side of the 49th-parallel,” said Flavio Volpe, who as president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association, has led efforts to scale up production.
“It would be very foolish right now to rely on trading partners, especially when our main trading partners have been hit harder by COVID-19 than we have. So we’re saying OK, if we need masks and export controls are going to be an issue everywhere including the U.S., then let’s figure out how to make them here.”
As the engineers at McMaster have quickly learned, realizing that goal means overcoming significant barriers presented by complex global supply chains and limited domestic production — all while racing against a ticking clock.
Cheap labour and increasingly sophisticated manufacturing ecosystems have made China the go-to supplier for everything from disposable masks to ingredients for pharmaceutical production.
And decades of North American and global market integration has led to high degree of specialization that has seen various manufacturing capabilities and testing capacity drift south of the border.
As a result, in just over two weeks, the McMaster project quickly evolved from establishing a manufacturing method for surgical and more sophisticated N95 masks to building an entire supply chain from the bottom up.
“This is not just about making masks for immediate need,” said Ravi Selvaganapathy, and engineering professor and the Canada Research Chair in Biomicrofluidics at McMaster University. “That is our first goal, of course, but there are other crucial long term bottlenecks we are trying to address.”
The biggest challenge: finding the basic material to make the masks. A proper N95 mask — the kind that can filter out droplets containing viruses such as COVID 19 — requires a unique material, specifically a “meltblown, non-woven polypropylene” with narrow fibre diameters and a specific pore size.
Any company that can make the fabric — there are manufacturers in China and the U.S. — has already been flooded with phone calls. Others are operating within countries, like South Korea, that have placed specific export bans on the material.
That’s left the McMaster engineers to scour Canada for a domestic factory capable of churning out the fabric, said Selvaganapathy, who oversees five teams, including one dedicated entirely to sourcing materials.
So far, no luck.
“We have discovered very limited capability to make filtration material in Canada, he said. “It all comes from the U.S. elsewhere and under the current scenario, those sources are blocked.”
So in the meantime, the materials team has turned its attention to exploring whether other possible fabrics could be sourced and treated to perform as well.
That requires testing — another key bottleneck in the process. Until recently, most masks were tested in the United States, said Preston, and some cannot be tested in Canada at all. Though McMaster sent some initial prototypes to a facility in Utah — that lab is “no longer accepting international orders,” added Selvaganapathy.
Undeterred, the university is building its own testing lab — the assignment for another team — that will be available to test not just the McMaster prototypes but masks procured internationally by Hamilton Health Sciences, the hospital network that has partnered with the university.
“The problem is regular supply chains are out of whack now and the new ones may not have the same kind of quality control,” Selvaganapathy said. “So if someone comes up with a million masks, what we’d like to do is be able to test them for that.”
Still another team is working on design, churning out prototypes — four N95 masks and nine surgical masks so far — and taking feedback from local doctors who are testing them for fit, comfort and function.
There’s one team for particle filtration tests and another building bacterial filtration tests. A final team is working with local manufacturers including Hamilton’s Nico Apparel Systems and auto supplier Woodbridge Group in Mississauga to ensure facilities are ready to tool up to urgently produce the latest generation of masks, if necessary.
In a normal environment, it’s a process that would happen over a period of five years, from design to regulatory approval to market. After two and a half weeks, the McMaster teams “are very close,” to creating a surgical mask that would pass standards, Preston said. An N95 mask will take more time — especially given challenges locating materials.
“Health workers won’t be abandoned, but the longer we flatten the curve, the more time we have and the further we can bring these devices along,” he said.
Similar processes are playing around the world — suggesting radical changes may be in store once this crisis passes, said Evenett.
“What this is, is a brutal education in the reality of supply chains,” he said. “That’s what policy-makers are getting.”