resultant decline in manufacturing output during the Chinese New Year holiday, the Chinese government mobilized factories across the country to operate at full capacity and tap into their full potential. With all its strength, it supported raw materials supplies and transport facilities throughout the industrial chain, so as to ensure large-scale production and distribution of materials for epidemic prevention and control. Medical manufacturers overcame such difficulties as labor shortages caused by workers not having returned to their posts. They resumed production as quickly as possible, and expanded capacity to the maximum.
Enterprises in other industries made rapid adjustments to their manufacturing facilities and turned to producing masks, protective suits, disinfectants, temperature measuring devices, and other products for the fight against the epidemic, thereby effectively expanding the overall output of such materials and equipment. The Chinese government quickly started procedures to review applications for producing medical supplies in times of emergency, and imposed stricter quality and safety supervision across the board, so as to facilitate production, ensure the quickest approval for sale, and guarantee supplies.
As of May 31, relevant authorities had approved 19 applications for clinical trials of 17 medicines and vaccines for coronavirus prevention and control, and conditionally approved the applications for sale of two medicines. Thanks to the joint efforts of many parties, manufacturing capacity for medical supplies increased steadily, and efforts to ensure the supply of medical materials and equipment achieved rapid progress: from acute shortage to borderline sufficiency, then from demand-supply balance to timely and sufficient supplies (see Table 2). The daily output of medical N95 masks and medical non-N95 masks increased from 130,000 and 5.86 million in early February to over 5 million and 200 million by the end of April. These efforts opened up unimpeded supply chains and logistics channels, gave birth to a coordination mechanism ensuring material supply, and allowed continuous transport of materials from across the country to the hardest-hit areas.
| Category | Product \ Unit | Daily production capacity | Daily production | Multiple of the daily production in the early stage of the epidemic (late January) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Personal protective equipment | Medical protective suit (million suits) | 1.89 | 0.8 | 90.6 |
