131–140 of 164 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Half a dozen somehow sounds more impressive than six...
Tangentially (this is HN after all) I also feel like "half a dozen" gives a more fuzzy confidence interval than a regular number ("6"). Of course, half a dozen literally means the amount 6, but am I the only one that reads them slightly differently? I almost see an implicit "about" before the phrase: "[about] half a dozen".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Half a dozen somehow sounds more impressive than six...
Tangentially (this is HN after all) I also feel like "half a dozen" gives a more fuzzy confidence interval than a regular number ("6"). Of course, half a dozen literally means the amount 6, but am I the only one that reads them slightly differently? I almost see an implicit "about" before the phrase: "[about] half a dozen".
Moving to a bigger scale, and then back down to a smaller scale maintains that implicit wiggle room.
Have governments made orders (legal or purchase) for manufacture of ventilators by large scale companies? Presumably ventilators are a relatively niche product - what's in them that the World's industrial complexes can't ramp up production of within a couple of weeks? I imagine it's the pumps that's the limiting factor? Given humanity already has the working tested, established designs. Can't governments requisition…
Large manufacturers including Vauxhall and Airbus are apparently planning to produce parts [2].
[1]: https://ktn-uk.co.uk/news/call-for-businesses-to-help-make-n...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/17/uk-manufact...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't right--almost all with beds in the ICU right now are mechanically ventilated; >50% will survive.
Wuhan study of COVID showed 31/32 died: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... non-COVID mortality is typically a coin-toss: https://www.google.com/search?q=mortality+rate+ventilators
I think early on, it was assumed ARDS was the worst outcome; your lungs stopped functioning and ventilation would tide you over.
But the more we dig in, there are multiple systems failing and ARDS is just one of many destructive processes going on.
This is one of the really important data points to work out. If almost everyone ventilated will die... it makes no sense for hospitals to extensively treat this way. Give people palliative care. It directs resources away from other, more productive efforts... for example ... running clinical trails on potential treatments to PREVENT ARDS/sepsis.
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I am not an expert on manufacturing biomedical devices, but I do know quite a bit about manufacturing safety-grade nuclear components. So take this with a grain of salt. However, from what I do know, fundamentally the requirements are pretty similar. There is likely nothing magical from a purely mechanical standpoint about making a ventilator. The part that is difficult is: * Have an adequate QA program for you and y…
> it took at least a year and a half to get the plant producing planes at an acceptable quality and quantity. I wonder if this would be longer or shorter today with how much of car assembly is automated. How many of the tools do one specific thing a human used to? How many are robots that can be reprogrammed? That, and cars and ventilators are completely different. I'd think a ventilator is closer to a dishwasher tha…
Base / core machinery- such as a 3-axis CNC machine, or a lathe, or a saw, for instance, are fairly nimble- if you have the right cutting bits (which you probably do, considering that it's industry) you can switch from milling out aluminum mounting plates to milling out enclosures for electronics fairly easily. At this level, generally humans are responsible for sticking in the material and telling the machine what to do each time an action is performed.
Where it gets more complicated is at the higher levels of automation, where humans might be supervising the machines, but aren't initiating processes themselves- for example, there was a prod cell that I worked with that had a robot putting raw material into a mill and then removing it- humans program those arms, but then after that, it just goes, and goes, and goes. Programming those arms is generally an exercise in making sure the math works, and then implementing the job in a bunch of for loops and hard-coded / static adjustment variables and the like. In these instances, to make the cell produce something else, not only do you have to program the machine that actually produces parts, but you also have to reprogram the bot that puts and pulls from it, and you may also need to change the grip on the bot to support the new geometry.
At the really high levels, like how car manufacturing is currently, there are processes where metal blocks go in and a whole monoframe chassis comes out. Taking that and saying "I want a ventilator assembly" is pretty much insane- besides reworking the entire line to support the new process, you've got to wire everything up, test it, inspect it, make sure everything is up to OSHA standards, etcetera etcetera, etcetera.
Going from producing one thing with a high amount of automation to another that doesn't have any similar parts is insanely difficult. Not saying it isn't worth it, but it might be better to go to the factories that are already producing the stuff we need- ventilators, masks, respiratiors, tests- and seeing if there are any bottlenecks that could be removed.
The best way? Have enough stuff on hand to actually handle a crisis. Too bad prepping for a rainy day doesn't really align with maxing out dividends and payoffs.
If some untested and unapproved method like this is used and something goes wrong, I would image that being a huge liability problem. Good on them for trying to save human lives, but our legal system does not always reward the ethical behavior.
https://emcrit.org/pulmcrit/split-ventilators/
Continuous mandatory ventilation (CMV) is required, however it is necessary to accept permissive hypercapnia.
Have governments made orders (legal or purchase) for manufacture of ventilators by large scale companies? Presumably ventilators are a relatively niche product - what's in them that the World's industrial complexes can't ramp up production of within a couple of weeks? I imagine it's the pumps that's the limiting factor? Given humanity already has the working tested, established designs. Can't governments requisition…
I keep seeing people asking "Why can't we just quickly spin up technology X?" where this is here ventilators, otherwise vaccines, etc... without much awareness of how much specialization goes into almost every aspect of every job. Hell, even fast-food workers-- a skilled grill operator at McDonalds -- take time to train up. No, we cannot quickly undo the 20 years of systematic dismantling of our core infrastructure.…
There are many companies using things like 6D CNC machines with high accuracy that can essentially spit out a part for which there's a definition (and we can 3D scan parts to micrometer accuracy with laser scanners); many electronics companies can make "any" circuit to some extent (I'm guessing ventilators use generic components, some circuits might be generic - like valve controllers, whatever, certainly display controllers I'd expect to be generic). Parts like keys, cases, outside the gas flow/control path are probably injection moulds that factories could pop out a million of within a week (once the dies are duplicated).
A skilled grill worker takes a while to train, but any grill worker given McDo's recipe could make you a functioning BigMac in an hour. I'm not asking for a new product to be designed (one effort - opensourceventilator.ie - are doing exactly that, making a modified BVM system).
Still looks like production could produce output in weeks rather than months.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I keep seeing people asking "Why can't we just quickly spin up technology X?" where this is here ventilators, otherwise vaccines, etc...without much awareness of how much specialization goes into almost every aspect of every job. Hell, even fast-food workers-- a skilled grill operator at McDonalds -- take time to train up. > No, we cannot quickly undo the 20 years of systematic dismantling of our core infrastructur…
Hey, thanks for the clarifications, and apologies to the community that I started ranting. The equivalence between "takes time to train up" and "20 years of systematic dismantling" is that we have lost many of the experts we might otherwise depend on in a national emergency. For example, Trump dismantled the Pandemic Response Team. You can't easily replace that overnight. Longstanding cuts to CDC budgets, etc. You ar…
Do you have trustworthy (confirmable), conclusive data that suggests the ideas (assumptions) in this statement are actually objectively true, and materially relevant to the actual problems we are experiencing? I've read a billion claims of this, but literally every single time I interface with the person that wrote it, the response is angry and evasive. Literally 100% of the time. Note that I'm not strongly implying any conclusions here, I am simply pointing out what I think is an extremely interesting and important phenomenon that is currently occurring on our planet, and I think there is a causative relationship between the two.
I follow your new analogy, it makes perfect sense to me, but how you connect this back to your conclusions is where you continue to lose me.