Self Sufficiency

[LondonManc]

Complete middle-class North London twaddle. These ejjits think that anything not involving smacking a laptop for a few hours a day is unskilled work that can be picked up in an afternoon.

Office workers are completely unskilled in trade work. Manufacturing relies on 3-4 year apprenticeships (and sometimes longer than that) to train people in the skills needed.

Even relatively low-skilled work can take months of training and experience to get up-to-speed with effective use of tooling and quality production.

Depends who it is and what it is. Having done factory work, I can say that some people get it easier than others - you generally have to keep an eye on the lad who actually goes to the Engineers' Room and asks for a long stand.

[xoggoth]

Hardly practical or economic for every nation to be self sufficient in everything but, all the same, it may be a good idea to have some core production and skills with regard to essential things, and be better equipped to tackle crises.

[LondonManc]

Hardly practical or economic for every nation to be self sufficient in everything but, all the same, it may be a good idea to have some core production and skills with regard to essential things, and be better equipped to tackle crises.

Our problems started when too many kids were pushed down the academia route - a degree has lost its worth compared to what it used to be and isn't the differentiator it used to be. Just a debt vehicle these days.

[Cirrus]

A lot of that manufacturing is automated to high degree - but one needs materials in place, hard tomimagine cotton will be made on the UK.

Hard to imagine a city would ever grow up with a name like Manchester; that would be known as Cottonopolis because of its domination of world cotton trade.

Hard to imagine that people in far-away, third-world Peru could ever shift massive amounts of asparagus to a city with a name like Manchester.

No, you're right. In the UK we can only ever hope to make jam, scones and clotted cream.

And pork pies.

[dsc]

I personally love all the "why can't the local trouser / sugar / bikini factory just start making PPE?". Same tulipe with ventilators and other equipment needed, as if any factory can just easily switch production and start churning out pharma equipment just because they already manufacture something. Pharma is most likely the most tightly controlled and monitored industry there is, you can't just make a ventilator out of spare parts from a fridge and start making thousands of them on a production line which was previously making engine parts. Ffs.

Btw slow clap for the government for the whole PPE supply tulip show. If this isn't criminal then I don't know what is.

[darmstadt]

There was me thinking this thread was going to be about The Good Life:

[Hobosapien]

I personally love all the "why can't the local trouser / sugar / bikini factory just start making PPE?". Same tulipe with ventilators and other equipment needed, as if any factory can just easily switch production and start churning out pharma equipment just because they already manufacture something. Pharma is most likely the most tightly controlled and monitored industry there is, you can't just make a ventilator out of spare parts from a fridge and start making thousands of them on a production line which was previously making engine parts. Ffs.

Btw slow clap for the government for the whole PPE supply tulip show. If this isn't criminal then I don't know what is.

I imagine the issue with lack of PPE being made in the UK is not so much the lack of manufacturing facilities and materials but the regulations, red tape, and 'oh we can't do that it's not establushed procedure'. Can't have something churned out from a new supplier without being approved after extensive testing. Seems they are more worried about that rubber stamp than recognising that plastic is plastic and rubber is rubber (or whatever the surgical gloves are made out of) and as long as it's non-porous is better than not having anything.

At the same time the amount of single use PPE they're getting through on a daily basis is ridiculous. Surely some of that is fit for reuse after appropriate cleaning or steralisation. i.e. instead of just binning the stuff for recycling put it in storage for a week and any virus is dead anyway. Are there other viruses, bacteria, or fluids the medics come into contact with that need longer periods to become inactive and no risk? If so then that's the period the kit needs storing for before re-use and set up a circulation of kit over that timeframe. Alternatively some decontamination room like they use for full biohazards is surely not difficult to provide to the hospitals.

Get the army in, they'd sort it out.

[HoofHearted]

you can't just make a ventilator out of spare parts from a fridge and start making thousands of them on a production line which was previously making engine parts. Ffs.

They might not be made of spare parts from a fridge but other than that it looks like you can

Firms including Siemens, Airbus, Ford and a number of Formula 1 teams worked with Penlon, a medical device maker, to adapt its ventilator so that it could be mass-produced at speed.

Under normal circumstances, Penlon would only be able to make 50 to 60 ventilators a week.

In line with updated MHRA rules, the ESO2 can also be switched on and off more easily, allowing liquid to be regularly drained from patients' lungs - something the sickest Covid-19 patients can require on an hourly basis.

Dick Elsy, chair of the VentilatorChallengeUK consortium which is making the device, said it had undergone "stringent testing and clinical trials for the last two weeks".

"Ventilators of this type are complex and critical pieces of medical equipment, so ensuring the absolute adherence to regulatory standards and meeting clinical needs were always our priorities," he said.

Airbus' Broughton site, which makes wings for commercial aircraft, Ford's Dagenham engine factory and McLaren's Woking site are helping to produce the ESO2.

[dsc]

They might not be made of spare parts from a fridge but other than that it looks like you can

Well they can help make parts, injection moulded elements, metal CNC made parts etc. but the whole assembly and testing is still bound by super strict rules. What if you make a 1000 ventilators a day and it turns out there's a flaw in them which makes patents choke on some plastic crap that's in the mechanism? There is no industry with such a direct impact on humans, sure if a pressure valve blows on an oil and gas site it might kill someone, but if you fail to spot something in pharma it will definitely kill / injure someone.

[dsc]

I imagine the issue with lack of PPE being made in the UK is not so much the lack of manufacturing facilities and materials but the regulations, red tape, and 'oh we can't do that it's not establushed procedure'. Can't have something churned out from a new supplier without being approved after extensive testing. Seems they are more worried about that rubber stamp than recognising that plastic is plastic and rubber is rubber (or whatever the surgical gloves are made out of) and as long as it's non-porous is better than not having anything.

At the same time the amount of single use PPE they're getting through on a daily basis is ridiculous. Surely some of that is fit for reuse after appropriate cleaning or steralisation. i.e. instead of just binning the stuff for recycling put it in storage for a week and any virus is dead anyway. Are there other viruses, bacteria, or fluids the medics come into contact with that need longer periods to become inactive and no risk? If so then that's the period the kit needs storing for before re-use and set up a circulation of kit over that timeframe. Alternatively some decontamination room like they use for full biohazards is surely not difficult to provide to the hospitals.

Get the army in, they'd sort it out.

You can't sterilise single use PPE as a) some of it is not suitable for it (like masks) b) you can never make sure it's been properly sterilised and that it's not worn out ie. can be used again. There's multi use PPE that you can use, like full facial masks with reusable / changeable filters, but things like gloves / gowns go in the bin as the risk of transfering other crap to other patients is far too great.

That of course didn't stop Public Health England from lowering the ppe requirements for surgical gowns and they are saying you can just wear plastic aprons as gowns are not available at most hospitals (so the requirement is aligned with what equipment is available rather than what is safe, wait a few more days and they'll be saying it's perfectly safe to just wear shorts and a baseball cap).