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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

#441

Post by zozbot234 »

endorphone wrote: post #423
chrononaut wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content quoted in the "The Star" makes it seems more to me that he's calling the _panic_ dumb, not the necessities required to fight the pandemic, which he acknowledges exists in his follow-on tweets, at least the ones "The Star" quoted. I also think the "coronavirus panic" is dumb, but I'm defining the "panic" when I say this as people buying 5 years of toilet paper, and unless there's more context that's what I…

Elon Musk's words- “My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself. If there is a massive redirection of medical resources out of proportion to the danger, it will result in less available care to those with critical medical needs, which does not serve the greater good.” “My best guess, for what it’s worth, based on the latest Center for Disease Control data, is…

> My best guess ... is that confirmed COVID-19 ... cases will not exceed 0.1% of the US population

My own best guess agrees with that. Really, it's all about how many cases you choose to "confirm". That's not very reassuring though.

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

#442

Post by bildung »

malandrew wrote: post #231
lutorm wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

As user lima-lima pointed out above, this most probably is an artifact resulting from different definitions of what constitutes an ICU bed - for example pediatric and neoanatal beds are included for the US, but excluded in the European numbers.

It also fails the sniff test: The US has less total hospital beds than almost every other industrial nation, but at the same time the most ICU beds?

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

#443

Post by rwmurrayVT »

ethbro wrote: post #162
SiVal wrote: post #145

It already does a lot of inflexible manufacturing, often by outsourcing overseas, but I'd love to see part of the US military converted to a rapid-response, highly flexible, fully-domestic manufacturing system. LOTS of very flexible automation, so they could take a wide range of designs and raw materials and rapidly switch from making one thing to making another and the ability to hugely ramp up production on demand…

https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Shipyards/Norfolk/Departmen...

'Their Optical Section performs optical alignment on shafting, masts, and other equipment.'

That's me! Norfolk Naval Station is just one shipyard in the area. There are similar yards with all of the same equipment. BAE/Colanna/NASSCO/NNSY/Lyons/ECSR. It's the same story in San Diego, Pascagula, Jacksonville, Hawaii.

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

#444

Post by MiroF »

adrianN wrote: post #427
76543210 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just an idea (that would never happen)- Why not make it like Engineering? You do your 4 year undergrad and at your first job, no one trusts you. Your supervisor/senior engineer checks Everything you do. You are reserved for paperwork and unskilled manual labor which is also checked. After a few years (4) you get some Freedom, but still checked by your seniors. Anything important, even when you are a senior engineer g…

The medical system works pretty much like this. After studying medicine you have a long practical education where nobody trusts you.

Yes, but we also have the “fellowship bottleneck” and limited med school seating we use to keep doctor salaries artificially high.

In addition to training new doctors, we should also just loosen restrictions for doctors to enter the US and use their medical expertise.

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

#445

Post by mhb »

greedo wrote: post #411
NohatCoder wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tubes down the lungs is definitely a bit tricky, not all patients will require that model though. As for careful monitoring, that is something the machine does on its own, as long as it has been configured correctly for the individual patient.

This is incorrect on many levels. A ventilator always requires intubation. Sometimes that's through the mouth, sometimes through the nasal passage (both cases are referred to as endotracheal), and rarely through a tracheostomy. Ventilators do have some monitoring capability, but require consistent attention from respiratory therapists. The chances of infection (VAP), pneumothorax etc are serious without careful monit…

A ventilator always requires intubation

Can you elaborate? This ventilator documentation[0] says for invasive and noninvasive ventilation

[0] https://www.usa.philips.com/healthcare/product/HCNOCTN98/res...

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

#446

Post by JeremyNT »

1propionyl wrote: post #51

To everyone saying "great, but why didn't this start months ago?" Well, sure, but the second best time to start is now.

This is just a PR play and an ask for government handouts.

It would be / have been a lot better for the government to just, you know, order ventilators from ventilator manufacturers in advance. Barring that, they could start helping them ramp up manufacturing now.

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

#447

Post by themaninthedark »

melling wrote: post #321

While we do need some equipment, instead of treating the symptoms, we could lock ourselves down and avoid the surge. We saw China stop the problem a month ago. South Korea seems to have stopped the problem with testing. Buy ourselves a month so we can ramp up testing. The US just past South Korea and France yesterday in covid-19 cases. We have 9400 cases and 150 deaths. By the way, China is reporting no new domestic…

China destroyed data and tried to cover up when the outbreak first started, now they are kicking journalist out of the country.

I would not believe anything they are saying at this point in time.

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

#448

Post by MiroF »

grey-area wrote: post #421
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…

My feeling is that we should be focusing on training up medical people on a massive scale, as that's something that the USA is notoriously bad at Or just lock down nationally now, including full lockdown in major cities, and none of this will be necessary. The only reason this is going to get out of control in the US is the lack of testing and the lack of controls being imposed. By the time they are imposed, it will…

This is a messaging failure.

We cannot just lockdown and “none of this is necessary.” There is no scenario short of locking down for 10 years that would be able to manage with the number of critical beds we actually have. We need to dramatically upscale capacity (which means training new doctors) and quarantine.

It cannot be an either/or.

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

#449

Post by penagwin »

DelaneyM wrote: post #391

Don't offer. Do it. Start making ventilators by the thousand. Screw patents, screw official sanction - when things get dire, the world will take every one we can get.

Yeah I'm not sure that's a good idea. I can only imagine it would cost millions to retool for ventilators - especially if you start just cranking it inventory.

Before you do that you want to make darn sure that they're actually needed or you're just burning money.

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

#450

Post by ssully »

koheripbal wrote: post #401
blhack wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s getting incredibly frustrating seeing people make this tired point. Yeah, we SHOULD have started a month ago, but we didn’t, and wasting time at a press conference trying to write some gotcha story about it helps nobody.

Politics as usual. Fault is more important to some than fixing problems.

Yeah let's fix the problems, but when this is all over I am not going to forget the people who were calling this a hoax in January and February. Time where deflection, instead of action, costed lives.
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