ROME – To stimulate the production of masks in Italy, regulations managing their production have been radically reduced as manufactures are unable to meet the growing demand, with three million masks a day being consumed in Italy, according to the Head of the Civil Protection Agency, Angelo Borrelli. With hospitals and pharmacies emptied of protective equipment, a self-certification process has been set up in an attempt to increase production.

  This process still takes weeks, given the time it takes to submit a certification application and be certified by the Italian National Health Service (ISS). On Tuesday, Attilio Fontana, the Governor of Lombardy, claimed that in his region there was "a company that could make 900 thousand masks a day that we could immediately distribute, with fabrics created by the Polytechnic of Milan. It is unacceptable that in an urgent situation like this one still gets flooded with bureaucracy,” as quoted in Il Messaggero.

  When protective health products such as masks are put on the market without proper certification processes in place, this can lead to either the illegal manufacture of masks or bureaucratic error. On Tuesday, 600 thousand masks were sent by the Civil Protection Agency to the regions without being authorised for medical use. The president of the National Federation of Medical Orders, Filippo Anelli, once he learned the news, sent a memo telling all medical colleagues to "immediately suspend the distribution and use of what they were receiving, and inform those that already had them in their possession, reports Il Fatto Quotidiano.

  The Civil Protection have been unable to explain the mistake. “I formally asked for explanations,” said Commissioner Domenico Arcuri, who is in charge of the expansion of hospital infrastructure in Italy during the pandemic. “At the moment, we don't have any. Nobody can give us an explanation as to what happened. This is very serious," he said, as quoted in quotidianosanita.

  There is a debate over whether increasing regulations will clamp down on cases like these, or whether they will only slow production which will lead to the black market filling the supply-demand gap. 

  Over time, this problem seems likely to get worse in Italy as the procurement of raw materials becomes increasingly difficult and expensive. The Sardinian handicraft manufacturer, Pasella craftsmanship, were initially able to convert their manufacturing base over to masks.

  “We use a sheet of fabric measuring 40 by 20 centimetres. We fold it in half, then apply the pleating to increase the filtering surface and fix them with elastic bands,” Giovanni Pasella explained in Il Gazzettino, whose company and its collaborators have been producing thousands of masks a week.

  However, since Mr. Pasella started, the cost of production has skyrocketed as fabrics and elastics became scarce. The price of 250 meters of elastic has jumped from 25 euros to 75 euros in the space of a week. “I fear that the cost will continue to rise," Mr. Pasella told Il Messaggero.

  In Europe, the production of surgical masks is almost non-existent, and nation-states are increasingly reliant on China, whre factories still produce 5 million a day, according to Il Gazzettino.

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