Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer

#151

Post by Zenst » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #67

WJW wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also regularly hear (otherwise very sensible) software engineers saying stuff like "Clone twitter? How hard could it be?". It's not very hard to see how manufacturing life-saving medical equipment in a rush without proper testing could go catastrophically wrong. Even if you get known-good schematics from another company, retooling (say) a car production line to make something else needs a lot of planning to make s…

Any government could clone Twitter if they must. It's not rocket science and Twitter is actually quite open about their architecture and technologies choice.

I think many would love if Twitter was partitioned by age - certainly make it less toxic in many respects.

Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer

#152

Post by Zenst » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

Zenst wrote: post #92

rkangel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NHS spending has not dropped, but it has not grown at the appropriate rate. There are various discussions that we could have about nursing numbers and junior doctor hours, but instead I'd like to provide one hard data point: Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge (technically Addenbrookes Hospital Trust, comprised of several hospitals on one site) is the largest hospital in the UK. For the tax year 2019/2020, the availab…

Yeah, let's look at where hospital money goes: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/hospital-bosses-face-1...

Sorry for those who don't like facts that go against their political agendas :(

Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer

#153

Post by dgellow » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #83

dgellow wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you have a toilet paper crisis? In north Germany at least shelves are refilled all the time. I’m back from groceries, Edeka, Lidl, and Rewe had all their shelves full.

Friends from Berlin tell me they still have empty shelves, so do the super markets in (western) Hamburg. They get refilled every few days early in the morning and are empty an hour or two later, only to sit empty for another day or two. It's gotten so bad where I live that Aldi has apparently decided to just give up and use the space for potting soil. The pasta shelves are re-stocked though, as is bread. Berlin isn't…

I'm in Hamburg, only spaghetti and hand sanitizer are still sometime missing in my neighborhood. During the past 2 weeks you could see some empty shelves depending on the time of the day, but it seemed to be temporary, due to the rapid increase in demand.

But now that people filled their shelves, I guess that store supplies are back to normal.

Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer

#154

Post by dgellow » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

stevenwoo wrote: post #138

dgellow wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you have a toilet paper crisis? In north Germany at least shelves are refilled all the time. I’m back from groceries, Edeka, Lidl, and Rewe had all their shelves full.

In America,I’m in Silicon Valley so people have money and space in their relatively large houses to store lots of stuff. Stores did not limit purchases early so there was panic buying early even here. Popular stores like Trader Joe’s and Costco have lines out the door for several hundred feet (they limit the number of people inside and everyone outside is six feet apart) but less popular grocery stores/green grocers…

Makes sense. I didn't consider that people in the US have way more place at home to store food. And I understand that people don't have grocery stores that close to their house/apartment, so they fill the car as much as they can.

Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer

#155

Post by wickedwiesel » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

kyrra wrote: post #108

sabertoothed wrote: post #41

Some key statements: "Dräger: In Europe, the number of intensive-care beds per capita is very unequally distributed. In Italy, it is three times lower than here. In England, five times lower. The challenge in England will be greater than in Spain. And the situation in the U.S. is very alarming. The reporting system there is also underdeveloped."

The US last got data in 2010 I believe. I believe this is the paper many people site today: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/disaster-medicine-an... > The median number of full-feature mechanical ventilators per 100,000 population for individual states is 19.7 (interquartile ratio 17.2–23.1), ranging from 11.9 to 77.6 Edit: WSJ opinion linked to a NIH study from 2012. https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-inte…

Since I looked around a lot for newer numbers, I thought I'd point out some newer numbers in my reply to the sibling comment [0].

In summary: Data for the US from 2016-2018 suggest 93,000 ICU beds total, that is a ratio of 28.43 per 100,000. (research referenced in WoPo article linked in the comment below).

For comparison, Germany (official 2017 data) has 28031 ICU beds total, a ration of 33.76 per 100,000.

Both countries likely have the highest ratio in the world at this time.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22711215

Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer

#156

Post by helij » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #14

pyb wrote: post #6

"I spoke with Daimler over the weekend. They would also like to help. But it’s unfortunately not so simple..." It would be interesting to hear more precisely why. We've heard more than a few well-respected industrialists essentially saying "Scaling up ventilator production ? How hard could it be?" Edit. Of course I am not suggesting that car assembly lines are suitable to build ventilator parts. That's clearly not wh…

We also regularly hear (otherwise very sensible) software engineers saying stuff like "Clone twitter? How hard could it be?". It's not very hard to see how manufacturing life-saving medical equipment in a rush without proper testing could go catastrophically wrong. Even if you get known-good schematics from another company, retooling (say) a car production line to make something else needs a lot of planning to make s…

Plastics are very easy if you have in house tooling capability. In 2002 I was working in a plastic moulding part of the factory that produces commutators. We went from 0 to fully developed product in 24 hours and were ready to mass produce. Hundred parts on three machines per minute. And this was 2002. I imagine today it's even easier. So, indeed this is not a hard problem because it was solved decades ago.

Dyson in UK is ready to produce their own version of ventilators already.

Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer

#157

Post by guitarbill » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

Zenst wrote: post #147

adwn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a long time ago, 30 year now. Neither the attitude nor the infrastructure from that era are still in place.

But the legacy is still apparent.

that's somewhat disingenuous, taking away agency and ascribing it to other nations - some of which haven't done so great in their own coronavirus efforts. so that doesn't really make sense to me, at least not in the 21st century.

in my experience, Germany is quite conservative (lagging behind in smoking bans, preferring cash over cards until the coronavirus hit), but wants to do the right thing (look at e.g. solar power subventions). them being a federal republic means they have similar jurisdictional issues as the US, but less hamstrung by a crippling fear and distrust in the federal government. those traits, if i'm accurate, would also explain it.

(what is still there as a disparity between some western states and eastern states.)

Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer

#158

Post by helij » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

lqet wrote: post #37

smoyer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That analogy is only partially accurate. For instance, injection molding machines are pretty flexible these days, parts are almost exclusively drawn in CAD and molds are commonly cut with EDM. Every injection molding house has to have the ability to maintain those molds too. So if you wanted auto manufacturers (or more likely one of their suppliers) to produce a plastic part, it could almost be hands off. Send them t…

You are assuming (edit: actually you aren't, see below) that the car manufacturers are producing these parts themselves. It is a lot more complicated for Daimler to produce plastic parts for ventilators (for example) if small plastic parts in Daimler cars have been produced in China for the last 25 years and delivered just-in-time to the assembly line in Stuttgart.

Europe is full of plastic moulding factories, big and small. Capability is there. Not everything is made in China. My friend has a small plastic moulding factory back home with 15 machines and his father is a tool maker. They themselves could produce 50,000 plastic parts a day if needed.

Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer

#159

Post by davrosthedalek » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #109

freeflight wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't confuse positive test results with actual infections. I don't, I'm mostly going by deaths/1M pop, and afaik even if the UK tested more, that number wouldn't change and still be more than double that of Germany. So Germany must do something right that the UK doesn't. Maybe it's the extra ICU beds, maybe it's the rapid testing, most likely it's a combination of both of those in addition to the better funding?

> So Germany must do something right that the UK doesn't. ... or wrong. Italy e.g. tests dead people for Coronavirus, Germany might conclude in many cases that people with prior issues died from those issues. I know Austria is very reluctant about this.

AFAIK, Germany counts Corona death similar/the same as Italy.

Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer

#160

Post by helij » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

megous wrote: post #71

There are already several simplified ventilator projects in the works: https://www.corovent.com/ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.24.20042234v... ...

So, they have a prototype and are ready to produce 500. Impressive. And it looks like that each and every country is now designing and producing their own ventilator. Also, a lot of them outsourcing the design which is great. In unfortunate events people come together and do great stuff!