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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

#451

Post by bildung »

zozbot234 wrote: post #441
endorphone wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be 330k. With the current growth rate of 25% per day we'll find out in 16 days.

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

#452

Post by MiroF »

Erikun wrote: post #346
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…

More medical personel would be great. Another option would be to train contact tracers, much easier to train than medical personel. That is one of the reasons for Singapore's success, I belive. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51866102

Until we lock down, I suspect that it is far too late to trace contacts. I know of at least 3 different secondhand exposures to Covid, just for me.

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

#453

Post by MiroF »

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…

We need to do whatever we can to increase capacity, and that involves breaking up the AMA cartel. This isn’t a two weeks and gone crisis, sorry.

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

#454

Post by tashoecraft »

mrfusion wrote: post #433
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing the Chinese did with solar panels back in the early 2000s. Subsidise national production so it could run at a loss, forcing others out of business and cornering the market. In some sense it's pretty obvious that a free market capitalist system will mostly lose in competition with a state regulated system, if the latter decides it is important to have control of a sector.

On the other hand China is giving us free money/stuff when they sell it below cost.

Yes, so on the short term that’s a benefit. But when it means the us/world doesn’t invest in a crucial piece of our infrastructure that would take many years to establish then it’s a net loss.

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

#455

Post by macNchz »

koheripbal wrote: post #402
jjeaff wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are a bit confused about the position the country is in right now. Regulations and regulators can and will be damned in an emergency. Of course, all reasonable precautions should be taken when producing medical equipment. But if someone needs a ventilator, they are going to die without it. It doesn't matter that there is a small chance that complications arise or some flaw in the ventilator causes it not…

This should apply to the vaccine testing protocols too. We cannot wait for 18 months for a vaccine.

I think there is way too much potential for unintended consequences in relaxing vaccine development regulations. The Cutter Incident in the 50s was a turning point on this: during the race to market a polio vaccine, 120k doses were produced that actually contained the live virus, infecting thousands and causing additional outbreaks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_incident

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

#456

Post by vidarh »

im3w1l wrote: post #286
vidarh wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is that until we have better means to train people without exposing them to real situations, increasing the number without lowering the overall skill level is an incredibly hard problem.

Well there are about to be a lot of real situations.

For one specific type of illness. But we do not need staff that knows how to handle only rare exceptions, and that is the problem.

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

#457

Post by vidarh »

Gravityloss wrote: post #300
vidarh wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is that until we have better means to train people without exposing them to real situations, increasing the number without lowering the overall skill level is an incredibly hard problem.

There's no shortage of people with ailments... A lot just go untreated or are queuing for a long time.

No, but there is a sufficiently large number of problems that relatively few people suffer from that even with people specialising there are plenty of problems where getting people to a point where they are competent enough to participate in operations on real people, and then get them enough experience to be able to do it unsupervised is a challenge.

We can specialize more, but that has its own problems in terms of e.g. availability to deal with urgent cases. And ultimately we do not get away from the fact that giving enough people enough experience even with relatively rare situations is a big challenge.

Eventually we will be able to simulate the situations well enough, and this problem will go away, but it simply is not as simple as throwing more bodies at it.

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

#458

Post by dajn9 »

I'm a simple minded engineer. In my work I use ventilators frequently and I often have to service them so I'm not entirely unknowlegeable about these devices.

There is a large need for mechanical respiratoration (a ventilator) then I have a thought.... Has anyone considered one HUGE pump working as a ventilator? The average hospital has a capacity between 300 and 1000, why not have one huge shared resource as a pump. The pump should have the capacity of sourcing sufficient O2/Air to hundreds or thousands of patients. There are obvious supply chain and technical challenges (thinking of how you create all that O2, the valving, filtering etc).

Example: 6 liters of air/breath * 500 patient bed hosptial so a pump volume of 3000 liters * 12 breaths or 36000 liters/min capacity, pumps of this magnitude should already exist. This effective giant set of bellows could then could source into a large diameter tube which runs throughout an entire hospital or nursing home. Each patient would have individual takeoffs with valve controland similarly a return exhale system (one giant collector, sterilizing-filter, etc).

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

#459

Post by leereeves »

throw55yu43 wrote: post #384
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…

> They jailed the doctor who tried to warn us. This is false. They did not jail the doctor.

Thank you for questioning that. Some articles (like [1]) said he was arrested, but the BBC said[2]:

> Four days later he was summoned to the Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign a letter. In the letter he was accused of "making false comments" that had "severely disturbed the social order".

> "We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice - is that understood?" Underneath in Dr Li's handwriting is written: "Yes, I do."

I misunderstood. But the point remains the same, just replace "jailed" with "threatened".

1: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-02-06/corona...

2: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382

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

#460

Post by formerchamp »

anthony_r wrote: post #397
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.

Because Elon thought that the coronavirus panic is dumb. https://elonmusk.today/ https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2020/03/11/tesla-c...

It is dumb. In the USA Corona deaths @ 150 so far while flu deaths @ 34K/year. Even Swine Flu had 4K deaths and MSM didn't bat an eye. Italy proving single payer socialized medicine has less talented clinicians and administration.
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