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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

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're overlooking additional options like "The patient would have survived without a ventilator, but one was used to improve their condition and it turned out it was a defective GM ventilator because who needs regulations" Also "the ventilator was fine but 12 months later it's still in service - who's going to throw out a working ventilator? - and now it's killing people because who needs regulations" You can't just…

> You can't just throw out all regulations It needs to be emphasized over and over that this is a national emergency. Think "War". Would you rather have a surgeon operate your wounded brain matter with rusted implements or watch you die? When youre living in a city where every hotel, every gymnasium and every school is full of ill people going through pneumonia - I am sure you would change your mind. Another way to t…

Medical devices have a lower fault tolerance and higher need for traceability because manufacturing defects mean lost lives.

In your example using rusty tools for brain surgery is a good analogy, as it highlights the false dichotomy you've created. A surgeon could also potentially stabilize you for long enough to search for less obviously deadly impliments. Or decide that, rusty tools or not, you're too far gone to help, and divert their attention to people who have a fighting chance.

Emergency doesn't mean we abandon common sense and decide rogue medicine is the only way forward. Even during a time of war, you'd need your tanks to operate as intended, not randomly fire or seal off the interior so tightly it causes suffocation.

This isn't fiddling with your laptop's inner workings. Medicine has a high enough need for precision that doing it poorly, or even forgetting one minor, necessary step in the process will cause more death and suffering than if you had just sat on your hands. The tight regulations are there for a reason. That doesn't mean we need bureaucracy for sake of bureaucracy, but some skeleton regulatory infrastructure will need to be observed for manufactuers efforts to save more lives than it loses.

Rogue medicine is a waste of resources and lives that will only serve to make this situation worse, as will unreliable medical devices.

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

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting up a ventilator for treating ARDS (caused by the viral infection and inflammatory response) is at the much harder end of respiratory therapy unfortunately. This is also one reason why just building the simplest possible ventilator simply isn't possible / useful here. Yes you could basically build a 1960s design en-masse but at the moment 50% of people on modern vents are surviving so this is no panacea. The t…

That minimal feature set is a CPAP machine + maybe an oxygen valve of the 3D printable variety. Modern CPAP machines can generate phenomenal pressures and can be adjusted with simple touch screens. They support automatic pressure reduction on exhalation, and Bluetooth/cloud access to the data in them for remote monitoring via mobile apps. BTW it's not quite as simple as 'hospital ventilators are hard to use'. Firstly…

A CPAP is fixed pressure, what your thinking of is a APAP or the bilevel type of positive air-pressure machines. And there lies the problem with you're miniumum feature set; not all *PAPs are fully-featured machines. Maybe only 10% or so are suitable for ventilator duty, which means they too are supply-limited

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

#544

This is how to respond to big challenges. There are going to be a lot of comments about how we messed up, wasted time, etc., but they miss the point. The WWII mobilization was a shitshow when it started. Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California turned out ships at an amazing rate [1] but it didn't begin that way. I remember hearing a story many years ago of what it was like when they first started. People were wander…

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

#545
post #179

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No one cares about any of this stuff. Rules need to be tossed aside to minimize loss of life. All FDA rules surrounding drugs need to be suspended for COVID19 patients. We need to start doing what china did and start using non approved anti-virals to save people's lives. We need to start vaccinating at risk populations(75 or older) with the trial vaccine if it is shown to be effective in the upcoming weeks. We cant w…

Woah there. Don't be so hasty to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Don't need another Thalidomide dropped on us just because things are looking a bit grim. It's one thing to ask "Do we really need to let this stand in our way right now?"; It's an entirely different kettle of fish to say "Screw it, if it kills the virus anything goes!"

So when given a choice to a 65 year old to die or take an unapproved drug. We should let them die. We are going to run out ventilators and will ration them. Our hospitals are already at capacity. Italy is at 8% mortality rate and climbing. We need to do anything to cut icu rate and spread. Virus is showing long term effects even in children. Known long terms issues is worse than hypothetical issues. Cautious thinking is why western civilization has failed to contain the virus.

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

#546
post #525

> There are going to be a lot of comments about how we messed up, wasted time, etc., but they miss the point. That, ironically, misses the point of the existing comments about how we wasted time. By wasting time, lots of people are going to die that didn't need to die. None of that has to do with mobilization itself or the issues that we run into during mobilization, it has to do with when we decided to mobilize.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22623990 .

I've seen this a lot but never understood what that exactly means. What happens when you detach a subthread?

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

#547
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When choosing a primary physician at one of the San Francisco Kaiser Permanente campuses, I noticed that a substantial number of doctors had overseas medical training. Which was fine by me--I'm an enthusiastic Kaiser member and support their cost management strategies--but I found it interesting.

Kaiser also recently opened their own medical school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente_Bernard_J._T...

So they're now using a mixed strategy of both out-sourcing and in-sourcing medical training to address high costs.

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

#548
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did they know to order more supplies in December? China reported the new novel strain of the coronavirus to the WHO on December 31. [1] If correct, then this means they were monitoring the news, and reacted immediately, and on the very same day of the fresh report. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6905e1.htm

We just didn’t know how serious this would get. We had H1N1, swine flu, ebola, SARS, MERS, none got out of hand this crazy. Our own president and task force kept on downplaying it for so long and giving us the wrong information. Even CDC was downplaying for a long time.

Perhaps this shows that industry experts, with skin in the game, are better at determining the relevant trends than the people and institutions you mention.

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

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So here is a legitimate question: At some point a few months from now, IF you are proven tragically wrong; what action will you undertake? Apologize and review your assumptions and outlook for all future circumstances? Or, as I suspect, pretend you never posted this and create a revisionist history of what your thoughts, opinions and stances were? The first sentence indicates ignorance of math / timescales; second on…

Guarantee you deaths will be less than swine flu deaths. But you will just say it's because of our amazing response, the same response being treated by MSM as inadequate. Just remember it was the Democrats/MSM willing to go scorched earth on the economy to push this pandemic narrative.

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

#550
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What pre-arranged plan?

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/national-strategy... What do you think the CDC does in the years there aren't pandemics?

I don’t know because most of those materials you linked to from the CDC are from 2005.

I see more recent docs from HHS.

So, what has the CDC been doing the last 15 years?

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