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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Without proper cleaning, it is a highway for infection. You also need to maintain a balance of blood oxygen and carbon dioxide. Many of these people require supplemental oxygen. So, you have to control respiration rate and oxygen mix. This would be a very bad to try yourself.
Intubation also reduces risk of of the patient infecting others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Without proper cleaning, it is a highway for infection. You also need to maintain a balance of blood oxygen and carbon dioxide. Many of these people require supplemental oxygen. So, you have to control respiration rate and oxygen mix. This would be a very bad to try yourself.
Intubation also reduces risk of of the patient infecting others.
If we get way more machines but those machines require a lot of intensive monitoring we could wind up with plenty of machines but not making any progress on the fatality rate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key insight that made me want to post this is we should actively try to move to an older ventilator design (does bulk of the work, not optimized but easier and simpler). I have encountered this in my life as a software engineer. MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) in the mid 90s was hard to grok .. you had this huge book by Jeff Prosise to absorb. I cracked it when I chanced upon a manual for MFC 1.0. It was super…
There are people in the world who live with very serious lung issues who do home management daily in order to survive. Non-mechanical lung clearance methods are a part of their daily routine. I've left some comments here on the possibility of doing lung clearance in the absence of sufficient numbers of ventilators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640905 I don't really care to argue it with anyone. Please go fi…
Best wishes to you and your family in these trying times.
This seems pretty important: > While the standard for a conventional ventilator uses a mask or nose tubes and follows current guidelines, the pandemic ventilator is at a standard from the 1970s and requires a patient be intubated, the medical word used to describe putting a tube through someone's mouth and into their airway. Do intubated patients need more attention from nurses/doctors? It certainly sounds harder the…
Do intubated patients have to be sedated/anesthetized?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are people in the world who live with very serious lung issues who do home management daily in order to survive. Non-mechanical lung clearance methods are a part of their daily routine. I've left some comments here on the possibility of doing lung clearance in the absence of sufficient numbers of ventilators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640905 I don't really care to argue it with anyone. Please go fi…
Thank you for bringing these techniques, verified by actual use, to our attention. I can well believe that, in a world where good first options are the norm, fallbacks may not be widely known. Even if they are insufficient in the worst cases, thay are still worth consideration. Best wishes to you and your family in these trying times.
I've been wondering, it seems like people have been setting up systems where multiple patients are connected to a single ventilator (with individual regulators?) If that works, maybe it might be more efficient to solve the supply problem, not by building a million cheap individual ventilitors, but rather a few thousand mega ventilators designed for multiple people.
(I'm not a doctor and my only source of knowledge on this is other hacker news comments)
In the 1930s polio epidemic there was a shortage of "iron lung" respirators, which were expensive to produce. Edward Both invented a plywood version, which was cheap and easy to produce. A re-purposed car factory then churned them out by the thousand.
Is a negative pressure ventilator relevant for COVID-19 treatment? (Any knowledgeable medicos here who can offer a critique?) If so, couldn't they be churned out by the thousand in a short space of time (ie. days)? My understanding is that the tooling is comparable to that used to produce a kitchen cabinet. They can even be manually operated in the absence of a motor or control system.
Edit: this development looks very promising for 'sub-intensive' cases -- adapting decathlon masks to provide positive air pressure (to help reinflate lungs) without intubation or leaking contaminated exhaust: https://www.isinnova.it/easy-covid19-eng/. Some emerging theories of pathology suggest that lung function can be increased by reinflating collapsed alveoli with constant pressure: https://emcrit.org/pulmcrit/cpap-covid/