Via Spain:
The agreement reached between the Government of Spain with Seat and Hersill for the manufacture of 400 daily respirators begins to bear fruit. Yesterday the first game left from the Martorell car plant in Barcelona to a Catalan hospital and today the distribution began to the rest of the national territory.
Correos is in charge of distributing free of charge the assisted respirators manufactured by Seat as part of a joint action to stop the advance of the COVID-19. The first ones ended up at the Germans Trias i Pujol Hospital in the Sierra de la Marina, in Badalona. And, with production already at full capacity today, exceeding 300 respirators, Correos’ logistics capacity has also been put at the service of the sanitary supply.
The line that until recently produced Seat León now makes respirators with the adapted motor of the windscreen wipers . A hundred and a half employees from different areas of the automobile company have been working on the final model for a week, after making 13 prototypes to reach the final one. More than 80 electronic and mechanical components make up each of the respirators, which pass an exhaustive quality control with ultraviolet light sterilization.
“Modifying an assembly line that manufactures a subframe, a car part, and being able to transform it and manufacture respirators has been hard work in which many areas of the company have been involved and we have done it in record time of a week” , indicates Sergio Arreciado, from Seat’s process engineering team.
And the US:
Scrambling to get production underway, the workers took apart a ventilator and 3-D scanned each of the roughly 300 parts, creating computer simulations of how the device could be assembled efficiently. Ford, which has partnered with a ventilator-maker and GE Healthcare, has been rushing to train workers and obtain the parts to have its first prototype ready early next week.
Ford and General Motors both announced in late March that they would build the medical machines after shutting down car production and sending workers home, a historic redeployment of their factories and workers.
And China:
Car firms are answering calls from governments to help make more ventilators and face masks to help out during the coronavirus pandemic.
On Monday, Fiat began converting one of its car plants in China to start making about one million masks a month.
The carmaker wants to start production in the coming weeks, wrote its chief executive Mike Manley in an email.
Other major car firms are looking at ways they can shift manufacturing towards ventilators.
In Australia, we have some capacity via the sleep sector but it’s small and is not making the most critical ventilators:
Australia is building towards about 10,000 ventilators for intensive care in the coronavirus crisis, a significant boost on the standing capacity in intensive care units around the country of about 2300.
The Australia and New Zealand Intensive Care Society surveyed capacity across the country on March 7, when the nation’s 191 intensive care units had 2300 intensive care beds with ventilators, president Anthony Holley said.
Hospitals had the capacity to boost numbers by about 500 very quickly. And they could ramp up to about 5000 by harnessing ventilators used in other areas of hospitals, including operating theatres, and by setting up intensive care in coronary care spaces, post-operative areas, and unfunded or decommissioned areas, and would require staff and other equipment.
“If we surge beyond 100 per cent it could be challenging at the current time,” Dr Holley said. “But there are an enormous number of strategies to get more ventilators and we as a society feel confident that the government is doing absolutely everything it can to get those ventilators.”
Parliament was told this week that an order had been with Melbourne firm ResMed for 1000 invasive ventilators, and four firms had stepped in to help with producing “non-invasive” ventilators – ResMed, GE, Philips and Medtronic.
And that’s rather missing the point anyway.
When offshore crises strike, you want to be able to retool quickly to match others and defend your nation from whatever threat.
A critical mass of manufacturing is vital in this cause. Whoops (scroll over to see countries):
So, how do we fix it?
Do what we should have been doing all along. Create markets that deliver benefits to Australians via meritocracy, economic diversity and productivity.
Here are a few tips. The Morrison Government will need to work on two fronts, micro and macro. On the micro it must:
- identify which areas of global supply chains it is no longer tenable to outsource. These segments must be actively incentivised with investment and research tax forgiveness;
- create industrial relations regimes that do the same with both unions and bosses on board;
- slash international student intakes and invest in, rather than debauch, education, and
- rejig bank capital rules to boost business lending over mortgages.
On the macro it must:
- slash immigration in half and collapse temporary visa categories;
- deliver cheap energy via tough gas reservation, pipeline regulation and a big green ‘new deal’;
- adopt an all of government policy for a lower AUD and higher productivity which includes cutting things like franking credits and negative gearing plus having higher mining taxes, and
- use tariffs or behind the border protections on specific supply chains.
These measures will begin to transition the economy from being overly reliant on Chinese demand and supply plus mortgage credit, to one that has more internal production drivers that are competitive and self-sustaining. The same measures will balance out the benefits to both capital and labour to make it politically viable.
There is no need to disengage further from what is left of retreating globalisation.
You will notice that such a project requires sacrifice by all. Therefore the greatest single challenge to making it work is the communication of the national interest project to the people. A leader is needed that can win them to the cause.
It will not be car industry assassin, Tony Abbott.
