Facemask shortage and the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak: Reflection on public health measures

Huailiang Wu; Jian Huang; Casper JP Zhang; Zonglin He; Wai-kit Ming

Model input and assumptions in our model are summarized in Table 1 . Specifically, the population and the numbers of healthcare workers in Wuhan city, Hubei province, and China were obtained from the Wuhan Bureau of Statistics and China Health Statistics Yearbook 2019 [18] [19] [20] . MIIT estimated that the daily facemask production in China is about 20 million at usual time 13 . Facemask storage was estimated to be seven times the daily consumption in hospitals 9 . We assume that 70% of the facemask storage in the whole of China would be supplied to the hospital system; thus, the baseline facemasks availability (F a (0)) was estimated to be 246,006,500, which is about 12 times of the usual daily facemask productivity in China. In our model, we assumed all facemasks on the market and in storage are available for consumption. In other words, we did not take into account factors that may limit the supply on the market, such as logistics. We assumed that the daily facemask productivity (F p (d)) changed during our prediction period due to the Chinese New Year holiday (24 Jan 2020 to 9 Feb 2020), the incentive to resume production, and new product lines. Specifically, we considered three scenarios for the changes of daily facemask productivity, i.e., 1) 100% productivity (20 million per day) before the Chinese New Year holiday, 40% to 60% productivity during the holiday, and 94% to 100% productivity after the holiday; 2) 100% productivity before the Chinese New Year holiday, 40% to 60% productivity during the holiday, and the productivity would increase from 94% after the holiday to 200% on 3 Mar 2020; 3) 100% productivity before the Chinese New Year holiday, 40% to 60% productivity during the holiday, and the productivity would increase from 94% to 400% on 3 Mar 2020 (See Table 1 for detailed description of each scenario). According to the MIIT and General Administration of Customs, the daily number of facemasks imported to China were 6,000,000 between 24 Jan 2020 and 29 Jan 2020, 20,000,000 on 30 Jan 2020 13 , 56,166,667 between 31 Jan 2020 and 11 Feb 2020 14 . Given a global facemask shortage has appeared in mid-February, we assumed a gradually decreasing daily import of facemask between 12 Feb 2020 and 23 Mar 2020 from 50% to 10% of the import volume in early-February and maintained a 10% of the import volume in early-February from 23 Mar 2020 to 30