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GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

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Re: GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

#231

Post by malandrew »

lutorm wrote: post #220
jacquesm wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A commercialized health care system has lots of perverse incentives leading to price increases and profiteering. This sets the weakest fraction of the population up for losing all they've built up in the last 3 months of their life while barely impacting the strong. It also means that those hospitals don't care about overpaying for their supplies and medication (but not their workforce) because they get to pass those…

A commercialized health care system also has absolutely no incentive to keep excess capacity for emergencies. It seems to be very good at finding the optimal efficiency point, which essentially is very close to "no unused resources in the nimal situation". But societal resiliency requires that health care, utilities, food supply, etc, has some excess capacity just because at some point something will happen. A public…

How does that square with a system that has the most critical care beds per capita:

https://sccm.org/Blog/March-2020/United-States-Resource-Avai...

Re: GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

#232

Post by grogenaut »

0xWTF wrote: post #222
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say: surely the US military maintains a manufacturing core? I’m a metal fabricator by trade, and one thing you quickly notice is: with a machine shop and a fabrication shop you are tooled up to build the machines to manufacture almost anything.

Folks, military physician here, operating at the national level on the analysis that informs these projects. The recent post on HN about the MIT $100 ventilator is one of the things that got this rolling. Manufacturing is spinning up. What I really need is developers on this project: https://github.com/joshua-s/coronavirus-diary

Josh you should put a call to action on the repo. There are no issues listed. I don't see links to anywhere that would let me help listed on the readme.

Re: GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

#233

Post by rickdangerous1 »

0xWTF wrote: post #222
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say: surely the US military maintains a manufacturing core? I’m a metal fabricator by trade, and one thing you quickly notice is: with a machine shop and a fabrication shop you are tooled up to build the machines to manufacture almost anything.

Folks, military physician here, operating at the national level on the analysis that informs these projects. The recent post on HN about the MIT $100 ventilator is one of the things that got this rolling. Manufacturing is spinning up. What I really need is developers on this project: https://github.com/joshua-s/coronavirus-diary

Wow...really? A MIT project with HN post is what kicked this off. As in...no one thought of this until then?

Re: GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

#234

Post by unishark »

mlb_hn wrote: post #211
leereeves wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world's response was late because the Chinese government lied about the virus. Just two months ago the WHO, relying on China's statements, said: > Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China[1] Two months ago the WHO said they didn't have clear evidence coronavirus was…

Leadership in the US Government wasted a lot of time trying to play down the pandemic [1] as did large (conservative) news organizations [2]. Both are now trying to blame China, arguably to shift blame from themselves. It didn't need to be that way; South Korea's government action back in January helped them while the US Government's action hindered response [3]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/opinion/trump-c…

If you read the entirety of [3], the American CDC's test was produced and approved at roughly the same time in early february as the Korean tests. The problem was a flaw in the test setting the process back, not a lack of government initiative. The remaining lesson in comparing SK and US here seems to be to rely on the private sector and not the govt in a crisis.

by the way, on reddit I see people from practically every western country complaining about their government initially downplaying and being slow to react to the virus.

Re: GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

#235

Post by malandrew »

BurningFrog wrote: post #80

Meanwhile, actual ventilator manufacturers are not getting many orders: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/18/ventilator-...

Because they are not the bottleneck. Intensivists that can operate the vents are the bottleneck

https://sccm.org/Blog/March-2020/United-States-Resource-Avai...

Re: GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

#236

Post by leereeves »

simion314 wrote: post #229
leereeves wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone should be blaming China. They jailed the doctor who tried to warn us. They lied to the world. They "issued an order to hospitals, clinics and other healthcare units strictly prohibiting the release of any information about treatment of this new disease."[1] That's not about shifting blame from the US government. That's placing the blame where it belongs. As the famously conservative editorial board of the Wa…

>That's not about shifting blame from the US government. That's placing the blame where it belongs. But for some reason Japan and South Korea were informed and handled the problem, so what conspiracy explains this? Japan has good spies? Japan has supernatural future prediction technology?

> But for some reason Japan and South Korea were informed and handled the problem, so what conspiracy explains this? Japan has good spies? Japan has supernatural future prediction technology?

According to the timeline of Japan's response in [1], the US responded at the same time as Japan. Their first countermeasure listed in [1] was a travel restriction enacted on February 3, the same time as US restrictions[2,3]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_J...

2: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

3: https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/02/us/coronavirus-us-travel-rest...

Re: GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

#237

Post by jacquesm »

iosjunkie wrote: post #225
jacquesm wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to start thinking of this as a logistics problem, not a tech problem. Ventilators is a solved problem. What is needed is a stream of parts and manufacturing capability. I'm not sure if car manufacturers are the right partners but they do have a lot of people that know how to put stuff together. They can put an assembly line for ventilators together; get a stream of parts going and start manufacturing long be…

Let’s throw masks and other PPE onto your list as well.

Yes, absolutely. In NL one quarter of the total confirmed infections is hospital employees and other healthcare workers!

Re: GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

#238

Post by radlad »

babesh wrote: post #221
onetimemanytime wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Did no one bother to actually read the article? It says that there can potentially be a shortage but that there isn't currently. By the time we see a shortage is late, way too late. Lungs need oxygen and cannot wait for purchase orders and negotiations. You'll need MILLIONS of them, and doctors that know how to use them, like yesterday.

Currently there is more than enough. The problem is lack of information and lack of distribution. Making more without solving those problems is ineffectual.

You can do both simultaneously - make more while solving the issue of communication and distribution. Again, you seem to miss the point - while there are currently enough, it is likely there will not be enough in the near future. If we don't produce more before that point, it is too late.

Re: GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

#239

Post by lsc »

malandrew wrote: post #224
lsc wrote: post #209

Yeah, I'm personally not too concerned with the "stuff" end of things. This is America; in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, we remain a manufacturing powerhouse. Apply enough money and we'll get whatever "stuff" we need on pretty short order. I think the big problem is medical technicians and doctors. My feeling is that we should be focusing on training up medical people on a massive scale, as that's something that…

It’s not that we’re bad at training medical personnel. It’s that the AMA acts as a cartel to limit the number of physicians train to keep income high. We just need to allow more people into medical schools and make more residencies available.

Yeah, remove the limiter, and how long does it take to make a doctor? I mean, sure, some people are saying that this thing is still gonna be here in four years (I am not a medical person, but that's what some of them say. something about the type of virus this is that will make a vaccine difficult) so that might not be a bad idea, but... I think we probably need to be focusing on how we can increase medical capacity four weeks from now more than four years from now.

Re: GM’s CEO Offers to Make Ventilators in WWII-Style Mobilization

#240

Post by jdc »

lsc wrote: post #239
malandrew wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that we’re bad at training medical personnel. It’s that the AMA acts as a cartel to limit the number of physicians train to keep income high. We just need to allow more people into medical schools and make more residencies available.

Yeah, remove the limiter, and how long does it take to make a doctor? I mean, sure, some people are saying that this thing is still gonna be here in four years (I am not a medical person, but that's what some of them say. something about the type of virus this is that will make a vaccine difficult) so that might not be a bad idea, but... I think we probably need to be focusing on how we can increase medical capacity…

Hell, we'll make it so med students can get a proper night's sleep during their residencies while we're at it.
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