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hardwood-products-puritan-2020 Puritan Medical Products - Wikipedia

The alarm sounded twice on Saturday, March Hardwood products puritan 2020 hours later, a second call went to Scott Wellman, Puritan's interim general manager, who was waiting in line for lobster rolls and sent it straight to voice mail. He would soon find out it came from Maine senator Angus King, who was trying to secure Puritan swabs on behalf of his senatorial colleague in Oregon.

There's a frenzy, a rush starting. The reason for proructs emergency calls was no state secret. While the media focused on the spread of the disease, public health officials and medical experts were waking up to how unprepared the nation was for this emergency.

Effective vaccines and pdoducts hardwood products puritan 2020 were purita off, and supplies needed to cope were scant. The U. All of which put added emphasis on testing. Experts agreed they had no chance of defeating the disease--or even containing it--until they could diagnose it. In the case of Covid, testing was necessary puritann identify those in need of treatment and to slow the virus's spread by isolating the infected, especially since such a high percentage--perhaps 40 percent, according to the CDC--are asymptomatic.

Making Covid testing widely or universally available had the potential to save millions of American lives and livelihoods; it was the key to keeping essential workers on the job and maintaining hardwood products puritan 2020 hope of opening the economy and education system safely.

There was one problem, though, as Templet and Wellman learned from pdoducts Hardwood products puritan 2020 phone calls--and they were it. The swabs Puritan made were essential to testing for Covid, and they were already in perilously short supply.

A day after calling Templet, Giroir warned of "speed bumps" in the testing supply chain on a conference call with laboratory representatives and state and federal health officials. At a press conference, California oroducts Gavin Newsom said: "I'm worried now about access hhardwood an adequate number of swabs.

The concerns were well-founded. Only two companies in the world made the type of nasopharyngeal swabs required for Covid testing, producing an estimated two million units per month combined--just 5 percent of the 40 million per month officials said were needed in the U.

One firm, Copan Diagnostics, was based in Lombardy, Italy, which was being decimated by the West's first major Covid outbreak and was in lockdown. The other was Puritan Medical, the pride of tiny Guilford, Maine population: So in one of the stranger turns in this most shocking year well into the 21st century, the most highly sought-after piece of tech on earth was a plastic stick with a tuft of polyester on one end--and the most important manufacturer in the world was a century-old family company founded as a toothpick maker.

In the low-profit-margin sector of hardwood products puritan 2020 supply manufacturing, Puritan had built its business model on diversification.

The company manufactures 1, products, including 65 types of swabs--ranging from hardwood products puritan 2020 cotton ones to cheek swabs used in home DNA testing kits to the nasopharyngeal swabs needed for the first-generation coronavirus tests. Suddenly, the company set out on a breakneck course of extreme specialization.

In short order, Puritan leased, gutted, and outfitted a ,square-foot factory, increasing its production of various Covid-test swabs to 90 million per month by the end of November.

Before hardwood products puritan 2020 end of Marchthe company will bring yet another new plant online that will increase its capacity by an additional 50 million swabs per month. All told, Puritan will have increased its production capacity more than fold within a year.

Fittingly, Puritan came into being in another act of entrepreneurial moxie during a global pandemic. The next year, when that productts fourth wave was cresting, he moved his factory to Guilford to be closer to the area's plentiful white hardwoood forests. Renamed Hardwood Products, the business expanded its product line to include Hardwood Products Guilford Queensland steak markers, hardwood products puritan 2020 forks, hardwood products puritan 2020 cream sticks, and, inPuritan-brand tongue depressors, the company's first medical product, which it still produces hardwood products puritan 2020. The company nearly perished when a fire that started in a dryer razed the plant and warehouse incoincidentally during the final days of the H2N2 flu pandemic.

When rebuilding, it did so with an eye toward the future, expanding its foothold in the medical products market, starting in with sterile packs and cotton-tipped swabs, followed by specimen-collection swabs for NASA.

Eventually, Puritan spun off from Hardwood Products and began winning patents for foam-tipped swabs, contamination-resistant DNA-collection kits, and an array of flocked specimen-collection swabs. Though at first glance they might resemble Q-tips, these swabs are highly specialized examples of elite materials engineering.

The designs vary by application--swabs used to clean machinery are distinct from those used to clean wounds and diverge in many ways from swabs for collecting laboratory samples. Collection swabs vary as widely as the sites where they do their work--from an alleyway crime scene to a delicate mucous membrane.

Small differences in size, tip material cotton, polyester, foamand transport medium dry, water, or alcohol allow for swabs tailored to the microscopic particles being collected and environmental complications such as moisture, dust, lint, static, and unwanted DNA. Even before Covid, Puritan maintained proeucts of its factory floor as a sterile environment. As it manufactures and packages its swabs, the company must eliminate hardwood products puritan 2020 possibility of contamination, which can make the difference between life and death in both criminal and medical investigations.

When President Trump traveled to the Guilford plant to congratulate Puritan's team in June, Puritan had to hardwood products puritan 2020 the day's production of swabs and destroy what it did produce in a short demonstration run, because of the number of outsiders who would be in the plant for the visit, including bomb-detecting dogs on Trump's advance team, members of the media who weren't wearing smocks--and a maskless president.

The company rescheduled the day's production for the weekend. The earliest Covid tests required nasopharyngeal swabs flocked with short strands of synthetic fiber to capture microscopic particles like hardwood products puritan 2020 coronavirus, which can be just 60 nanometers in diameter.

Many newer tests are less invasive and don't need samples from the pharynx. These rely on nasal and oral swabs with shorter applicator sticks wrapped in finely porous polyurethane foam, pocked with tiny perforations per square inch that trap viral particles. Wellman quickly identified a production site in Pittsfield, Maine, about 30 miles from Puritan's headquarters, a former hardwood detector plant that had lain idle since He and Templet then entrusted the factory conversion to year-old manufacturing engineer Derek McKenney.

A second-generation employee his mother has worked at Puritan for 30 yearsMcKenney had supervised the introduction of new product lines and packaging machinery here and there, but nothing anywhere near this magnitude. With teams working in two shifts totaling 19 hours a day, McKenney's schedule started with a project management call at 3 a.

Time constraints forced Puritan to eliminate any inclination to deliberate. The naval shipbuilder had, at the government's productw, set aside its work building guided-missile destroyers to fabricate 30 custom swab-wrapping machines for Puritan.

With no time to risk on mistakes in fabrication, Edgerly took a machine offline and had it trucked over to Bath, so hardwood products puritan 2020 workers there could refer to a working model and not just blueprints. Hardwood products puritan 2020 new factories feature high-speed production lines to meet ambitious goals, with harewood robotic technology that requires a steep learning curve.

To operate the first Pittsfield facility, Puritan needed to add employees to the already there; with another jobs coming to the second Pittsfield hardwood products puritan 2020, Puritan will effectively be doubling its head count.

Puritan's location in sparsely populated, highly forested Piscataquis County has posed recruitment challenges. So, at first, Puritan brought in temporary workers.

As new staff started to arrive, they were delayed by an onboarding process made more methodical by Covid protocols.

Puritan has not had a single worker test positive for the virus. Many positions hardwood products puritan 2020 the production floor required significant hardwood products puritan 2020 training, which was slowed by social distancing rules hardwood products puritan 2020 restrictions hardwood products puritan 2020 the number of attendees at sessions.

As a result, the new factory will include a sizable hardwood products puritan 2020 space. At least one hazard lies ahead for Puritan after the world emerges from Covid. Copan Diagnostics, its Italian competitor, has sued it, alleging patent hardwood products puritan 2020 over five flocked swabs; the parties tabled the proceedings to focus on the pandemic. But legal issues aside, Puritan appears well-positioned to thrive in the post-pandemic world, armed with new infrastructure and invaluable problem-solving experience.

Templet doesn't foresee a drop in demand for Covid testing anytime soon and believes a focus on readiness for the next global health crisis exists both at home and abroad. You always need a swab. Templet and Wellman aren't looking to take a victory lap while the nation is suffering through a catastrophic second wave.

But they know their story will resonate when this pandemic finally recedes. How many times do things have to go just right? Correction: An earlier version prooducts this article incorrectly stated that President Trump's refusal hardwood products puritan 2020 wear a mask precipitated Puritan's disposal of a day's production.

Puritan had scheduled the day's production for the weekend because of the number of outsiders in the plant and planned a short demonstration run for the visit. The poducts from the demo was later destroyed. Meet Inc. Innovate Creativity Invent Design Pivot. Top Stories. Top Videos. Derek McKenney, senior manufacturing engineer, Puritaj Wellman, interim general manager, and Timothy Templet, head of global sales, have helped make Puritan a hero of the pandemic.

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Dec 21,  · Pittsfield, ME (PRWeb) December 21, Hardwood ProductsCo., LP will be donating a check in the amount of $20, to Piscataquis Regional Food Center (PRFC) in a ceremony at Puritan’s new Pittsfield manufacturing facility on Monday, December 21 at 9 a.m. The company is also matching up to $5, from employees for a possible total donation of $30, Based in Guilford, Maine, Puritan's parent company is Hardwood Products Co. In April , Puritan received over $75 million from the U.S. Department of Defense to produce more “flock tip testing swabs,” which are preferred for COVID testing. In June National Hardwood Products Group , President Trump visited the company, highlighting its “noble tradition of American manufacturing excellence for more than years.”. I was there to learn about Puritan’s sister business, Hardwood Products Co., located just across the street, to do a lighthearted article about American-made popsicle sticks. The two companies.

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