Developing Products Amid COVID-19: Innovating Production Systems for Surgical Mechanical Cable Making

Did you know that to be able to say, “not this again,” in response to the current global health emergency, you would have to be no younger than 102 years old? It’s true. The last time the world saw such a crippling public health crisis, the year was 1918, when the flu pandemic sickened one-third of the world’s population. But, in the throes of a calamity unseen in over a century, which has now even shut down the world’s economy, one would think manufacturing would simply stop as well. And certainly, with unemployment figures estimated to be as high as 20 percent in the United States, the highest ever since the Great Depression, it isn’t difficult to imagine a slowdown in the making of virtually anything built by America’s proud stable of manufacturers.1