- A gray market of importers are donating respirator masks to US hospitals

As of March 30, there were 1,404 search results for GoFundMe campaigns featuring the word “N95,” and that number is growing. These campaigns, ranging from asks of a few thousand dollars to millions, have mostly proliferated in the United States in the past week and a half. With them a constellation of WhatsApp groups, Slacks, and Discord channels have emerged, coordinating a rapidly moving self-organized network that’s trying to do what federal agencies, state governments, and traditional medical companies apparently cannot do fast enough: import N95 respirators — the National Institute of Safety and Health (NIOSH)-standardized and increasingly coveted protective mask that filters 95 percent of particulates — into the United States and donate them to hospitals.

As more and more reports from American hospital workers on the dire lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) pour in, people outside of the medical equipment supply chain are looking for ways to help. Art students are scouring metal shop supply closets, companies are donating private stockpiles, and people are even fabricating DIY masks. Mask importers, who are primarily working on imports from China, where the majority of N95 masks are manufactured and where there’s currently more supply, are of a slightly different character and scale — some individuals, yes, but some partnering with major players in venture capital and startups. And if you want to buy KN95 Disposable Face Masks, visit z2u.com, a professional online in-game currency store.

The typical supply chain for getting N95 masks to American hospitals should look something like this: Based on projections of future demand and existing contracts with hospitals, a medical supplies company places an order for a certain number of masks either directly with a (typically overseas) partner factory or through an intermediary supplier. Those hundreds of thousands of masks are sent to the medical supplies company via container ship, and the medical supplier then arranges distribution to buyers. The turnaround time from initial projection to actual product in hand can be 65 to 80 days.

Through this entire 65- to 80-day process, there are lots of layers of bureaucratic quality assurance. The factory is responsible for acquiring key materials (like the non-woven polypropylene crucial to N95’s superior filter, and ultrasonic welding equipment sometimes used for attaching rubber bands) to meet the standards of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration (manufacturers of N95 masks need to receive certification from both). The medical supplies company is responsible for vetting the quality of its factory’s output, and hospital procurement officers are responsible for making sure they’re getting their product at a fair price.

Combined with companies making conservative inventory purchases in the past year to avoid the tariffs of the US-China trade war and a major N95 mask manufacturing hub (Wuhan) being the first region hard-hit by Covid-19, conditions before the pandemic were already unfortunate.