Report: 3M in S.D. making millions of N95 masks
March 23, 2020
The 3M locations in South Dakota and Nebraska are producing 35 million N95 masks per month, according to The Washington Post.
And they’re starting to reach medical workers, with one-half million masks shipped to New York and Seattle with arrivals starting today.
3M has locations in Aberdeen and Brookings that have been reported as making the masks.
Ninety percent of the masks will be sold for health care workers after a change in law last week eliminated the threat of lawsuits from such sales.
The other 10 percent will go to industrial workers who are “also critical in this pandemic” in sectors including energy, food and pharmaceuticals, 3M chairman and CEO Mike Roman said in a statement Sunday quoted by The Washington Post.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, 3M has doubled its global output of N95 respirators to an annual rate of more than 1.1 billion per year, or nearly 100 million per month, the company said in a statement.
In the U.S., 3M currently manufactures more than 400 million N95 respirators annually, which is increasingly being directed to support both government and public health responses. The company also manufactures respirators at locations in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.
In addition, 3M is increasing its investments, primarily in the U.S., to expand its global capacity by more than 30 percent in the next 12 months.
The company also is maximizing production of a wide range of other products used in the COVID-19 response globally, including hand sanitizers, disinfectants and filtration solutions as the pharmaceutical industry works to find a vaccine to fight the virus.
