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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

#271
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…

Sure, the regulatory regime needs to be relaxed to quickly bring on more manufacturing capacity. I believe it will be. Throwing it out entirely and allowing anybody to manufacture and sell medical devices from their garage is not going to happen. That being said, auto manufacturers likely have no experience manufacturing these devices. The don't know which optimizations will be dangerous. They may not recognize they…

> Throwing it out entirely and allowing anybody to manufacture and sell medical devices from their garage is not going to happen.

The situation we are in is the same as a doctor doing an emergency tracheotomy in a restaurant using a pen sterilized with some gin. No one really wonders what the serial number is of that pen or whether it was made with the high quality requirements of surgigcal equipment.

The machines produced in a mobilization shouldn't even be compared with those produced in peacetime. They should be compared to nothing at all. So when the question arises "is this device safe"? The relevant answer is "well this patient is dying on a stretcher in a tent next to a thousand others like him, so we'll use it".

It follows that it's important that these devices are either destroyed or quality certified after the fact. These can't be used in five years in during a routine surgery, of course.

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

#272
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A commercialized health care system also has absolutely no incentive to keep excess capacity for emergencies. It seems to be very good at finding the optimal efficiency point, which essentially is very close to "no unused resources in the nimal situation". But societal resiliency requires that health care, utilities, food supply, etc, has some excess capacity just because at some point something will happen. A public…

How does that square with a system that has the most critical care beds per capita: https://sccm.org/Blog/March-2020/United-States-Resource-Avai...

Second most at best. Turkey has 46 / 100k.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_...

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

#273
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…

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.

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.

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

#274

This made me feel a twinge of patriotism. Something I haven’t felt in a long time.

We are Americans, we have gone through a lot in this country. In dire times, when humans get together to solve problems - I get goosebumps and tears in my eyes. In our normal day to day life, consuming media and seeing how fragmented this nation has become - incidents like this bring us all together to fight a common enemy. We should have the onus and the courage to help everyone in the world, not just the US. Our im…

It's times like this that make us so great. We've been riding on success for so long, it's been easy to forget how we have a goal in the world and that our existence is not guaranteed.

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

#275

China travel was banned on 9th February, when dems were busy with impeaching trump for investigating the precious vps crimes. Congress messed up and wasted time. Thr brouhaha now is a deliberate attempt to crash economy to prevent Trump's reelection. Edit: all I am getting are drive by downvites, I dare anybody to counter with facts with sources (not from cnn preferably)

I'm not an expert but I'm guessing the downvotes are coming from your comment being super political and unfactual. Keep in mind this is not Twitter so the sorts of comments that appeal to Joe Sixpack and Donna Doublewide don't always gain traction here.

Trump has unquestionably bungled the response to Covid so you might be getting downvotes related to your bizarre defense of him too.

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

#276
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we are in a unprecedented situation but I am not sure that the regulations will just be “damned”.

Liability will be damned. If there's a military requisition of ventilators, the government alone sets the standards and quality. And the government alone gets to complain about violations. Maybe it wants ISO 9000, but I imagine they'll take 1960s class ventilators if they can be ready by a date certain. You, citizen, can sue the government and allege that the MASH ventilator spec was reckless and deprived you of your…

Just to add to this: We don't put pilots in jail for shooting down an enemy aircraft. In an extreme case, we cannot file a lawsuit for mistakenly launching nuclear missiles because of miscommunication - war would have ensued.

I think people are too hung up on the societal fabric, daily life and normal circumstances that when an emergency arrives at your doorstep, you're too clumsy, too weak and too ignorant of what the reality demands.

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

#277
Can they also manufacturer anesthesiologists and acute care nurses? Medical beds? Hospitals? Effective PPE so what few staff we have can carry on working? What about safe, medical grade oxygen?

It's not enough to have ventilators and beds for 15% of your population. You need a joined up response across the board. This is good, but it's not enough.

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful. I'd rather have an unregulated ventilator and maybe live than no ventilator and die for sure.

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 think is - if COVID-19 had a mortality rate of 100%, and R0 of 3; what would you do about regulations? We are lucky this virus isn't as deadly as Ebola (50% CFR) and as contageous as measles (R0 6-7). If there is death to humanity looming in the future, that's the virus its waiting for a human contact in some bat cave. What regulations then?

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

#279

China travel was banned on 9th February, when dems were busy with impeaching trump for investigating the precious vps crimes. Congress messed up and wasted time. Thr brouhaha now is a deliberate attempt to crash economy to prevent Trump's reelection. Edit: all I am getting are drive by downvites, I dare anybody to counter with facts with sources (not from cnn preferably)

> [The] brouhaha now is a deliberate attempt to crash economy to prevent Trump's reelection.

That's an incredible claim on its face. I'd suggest that you have the burden of truth here.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally what the military is now. Under the berry amendment a lot of what the military buys needs to be 100% domestic. A significant fraction of military spending is to ensure that the logistics are in place in case of a greater need in the future, not just to fulfill current needs and training, or any specific mission.

Same reason there are rules about ships going between US ports been manufactured in the US - to keep strategic ship building capacity in the event of a war.

That well meaning law means there’s one cruise ship that fits the requirements, all the others visit one foreign port. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_of_America

It looks like the cargo ship law, Jones Act, is more successful in creating capacity.

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