The global scramble for this vital item has exposed the harsh realities of international politics and the limits of the free market. By Samanth Subramanian
If Ovidiu Olea is astonished by the fact that he’s gone from being a finance guy to a mask mogul in four months, he shows no sign of it. The transition started innocuously. Late in January, when the coronavirus spread beyond Wuhan, Olea decided he would buy masks for his staff. He lives in Hong Kong, where he runs a payment technology firm. His staff isn’t large – just 20 employees – but finding even a few hundred masks proved hard. Part of the problem was that last year, after protesters in Hong Kong used masks to hide their identity, the Chinese government restricted supplies from the mainland. Before the pandemic, half the world’s masks were manufactured in China; now, with production there shifting into overdrive, that figure may be as high as 85%. If China isn’t sending you masks, you likely aren’t getting any at all. We have no masks, local pharmacies told Olea, but if you find some, we’ll buy them from you.
Olea got to work. In a journal article, he read that epidemiologists spoke highly of N95 respirators, masks that filter out 95% of small particulate matter. Stealing time out of his day job, Olea began phoning N95 suppliers in Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Ireland. Each one turned him down. “The answers ranged from ‘No’ to ‘We only sell to accredited buyers’ to ‘Come back next year,’” Olea told me. After three days, Olea found a South African firm named North Safety Products, which had 500,000 masks in stock. Olea bought them all, at less than a pound per mask, certain that he would be able to sell the surplus.
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