Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Francesca Dy. Laura Carlson is out. It's day one h since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Our main story, masks and other personal protective equipment are the only things standing between frontline healthcare workers and infection. But fake or badly made masks are circulating through the market and they can be very hard to spot. But first,
here's what happened in virus news today. President Donald Trump will hold a massive indoor campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, tomorrow. Cases in Oklahoma have skyrocketed since the beginning of June. The White House has dismissed suggestions that the rally will lead to a dangerous rise in actions, but epidemiologists and other experts agree the rally is likely to cause a so called superspreadery event. The b Ok Center where the rally will take place, seats nineteen thousand people and President
Trump intends to pack it. Attendees will need to sign waivers absolving the Trump campaign of liability, and temperature checks will be done at the door. Masks will be provided, but not required. Experts say these measures can ensure no infected people will get into the venue, and that temperature
checks are virtually meaningless. The differences between the Trump rally and the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests from a public health perspective is the entirely enclosed nature of the arena and the likelihood that an older, more vulnerable group will be at the b Okay Center. The protests have not yet been linked to a spike in cases. The United Kingdom lowered its COVID nineteen alert level by one rank
to love three. That reflects the fact that the coronavirus is no longer spreading exponentially in the community after almost three months of lockdown. The new level allows for more
relaxation of social distancing measures. Some non essential shops had already reopened this week, and finally there's now a sign that the coronavirus reached Italy, the first European epicenter of the crisis, two months before scientists first believed sewage samples taken from the cities of Milan and Turin in December showed traces of stars cove two, according to a new study. The report is part of a regular round of testing on environmental virology carried out by government agency since two
thousand seven, and now for today's main story. If there's one simple technology that has come to the forefront during the coronavirus pandemic, it's the face mask. Special masks called respirators are designed to prevent doctors and nurses from catching the virus when they treat infected people. But not all
respirators do what they're labeled to. Fakes and shoddy products abound, and you can't always tell how many particles of mask can filter just by looking at Bloomberg reporter Naomi Kraski reported on how you catch a fake mask and the lengths one German company is going to to fight the problem. This is the sound of a lab at testing company to if Nord from a video where workers are inspecting
the filters on face masks. In Germany, when people talk about testing and the tooth, it's usually in the context of cars. If you want to drive and twenty miles an hour on the Autobahn or even twenty miles an hour down your own street, you have to get everything from breaks and lights to bright yellow hazard gear and body rust checked out at your local toof testing center every two years. But Germany's Industrial Quality Control companies inspect
a lot more than just vehicles. When the government started shipping in face masks by the hundreds of millions from China as coronavirus infections spiked around the country, it turned to tuf Nord to help make sure the masks are fit to use. It's far more than a rubber stamp. Almost one quarter of the masks failed the test, and executive at the company told me we are currently walking in three shifts UM twenty four hours per day, seven days a week, in order to cope with a tremendous
number of mass tests. That's Dirk stend Camp, CEO of tiff Nord. Though they're known for cars testing workplace safety, here is actually how they got their start. UM. The foundation year was actually eighteen hundred sixty nine UM as a North German association for the monitoring of steam boilers actually UM. At that time we were based in Hamburg UM and we were actually inaugurated to protect human beings against the hazards of new technologies. There used to be
close to one hundred independent testing companies in Germany. Mergers and acquisitions brought that number down to fewer than ten, and each of them does business everywhere, not just in Germany. Tif nord stend Camps company tests everything from data security for smartphone apps to nuclear power plant safety. Before the coronavirus was one of only a few institutions accredited to test face masks at all. A few doctors needed the most protective type of masks, respirators designed to filter out
airborne particles. With the virus that changed, doctors need to be protected from tiny particles called aerosols. The Corona virus is able to be transported through such small aerosol particles of a size you are not able to see with the human eye, even under a microscope, and these FFP masks are now designed to actually filter these aerosols. The process of screening the masks to make sure they can do this job starts before a shipment ever leaves China.
The masks have to pass a literal smell test. TIFF's local inspectors check for a chemical odor and test the ability of the straps. They check the paperwork. A second team is waiting when the plane touches down in Germany. They do another visual inspection and check the freight papers, and then our inspectors mark shipments either green that means has past test or rett that means has not passed, and only the green ones are then finally checked in
our laboratories. That means we take samples out of the green marked or labeled masks bitches, and these southern specifically tested. That's where things get really detailed. Let's go to Essen, a city in the middle of Germany's rust belt, the industrial rural area. Chief's testing labs there used to work on face masks for coal miners. When the mining business declined, they tested particle filters and everything from vacuum cleaners to
air conditioning. Their experts on dust. They even produce and sell their own test dust. But for the past couple of months their biggest business has been the virus. Here's
Dirk Wrention, who runs the lab year. The masks that are made are made in China, and in China there are some very good producers that ensure very reliable and good mass deliveries, but precisely in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, they are also various producers that are naturally trying to do a good business and unfortunately are also
to some extent really dishonest. That means that At first they ship good masks that also show good results and tests, and then in following shipments deliver masks that at first glands seem to be the same quality, but then show themselves and flitter tests to be significantly worse. Wrenchens teams pull samples from each batch of masks and test them
in a process that takes two or three days. This is a special quick test, by the way, the full European testing protocol for face masks takes a couple of weeks. The first step is simply to put the mask on. It's called a dawning test, and a three person panel of testers with different head sizes, two men and a woman tries each sample mask. They want to make sure it's air tight but reasonably comfortable. Then it's on to
the less subjective measures. They strap the mask onto a special machine that looks like a model of a human head in order to measure how much air flow can pass through the filter each minute. The idea is to ensure that if you're wearing the mask for hours, you won't feel like you're suffocating. Finally, comes the filter test. They use a special chamber filled with a high concentration of a test gas and the mask gets attached to
the end of a hose. Air from one side of the masque from the outside of the mask is suctioned through and measured to see how many particles arrive on the other side. In order to meet the European f FP two standard masks are supposed to filter out of aerosols. That's about the same level of protection as a US AND mask or a Chinese kN mask. But this is where appearances can be deceiving. You can identis inus fildo
matrial alarm. You can have a really identical looking filter material that lets through forty of the aerosols without being able to tell the difference from another better mask by touch or feel. The German Ministry of Health said that about of the masks it's had delivered so far have failed these tests. Looking across the board at all the masks too has tested Wrench and put the figure slightly higher. Just under a quarter of all masks that reached his
labs weren't up to grade. The quality was even worse for simple medical masks, which filter fewer particles than it was for the more high tech respirators. He said, that's why tests like this absolutely necessary because simply due to the enormous quantities of masks that are currently being shipped to Germany, the risk is very very high that otherwise low quality products would be delivered. Germany is by far
not the only country to face this problem. In the US, US the Food and Drug Administration banded more than sixty mask producers after they failed similar tests at the CDC's National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory. So far, too teams have helped screen more than eight hundred million masks. They're nowhere near finished. As of the beginning of June, the German government was still waiting on delivery of another one point five billion masks through this fall. That was Naomi Krasgy
in Berlin. And that's our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by topor Foreheas, Jordan Gospore, Magnus Hendrickson, and Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Naomi Creski. Original music
by Leo sidran Our. Editors are Rick Shine and Me Francesca Levy. Bloomberg's head of podcasts is also Me.