I like the effort and project. I tried looking at it and the techcrunch articles and was disappointed by this and the open source mask efforts. This is going to sound horrible but I think there is something that needs to be said. We shouldn't have to hack/make our way out of this shortage. I say this as a diehard hacker/maker. A factory can put together high quality and high volume versions of these two items. It is a national shame (I'm in Canada but lived in the US for years) that we don't have domestic capacity and ability to surge on these items. We can still surge. This is not bloody rocket science. If we start today, we can have factories in a month. We should be surging on this today. We should have been surging on this since January and not have to deal with a shortage of bloody test swabs. I know raw materials and equipment are in short supply. But if our economies are truly unable to find the necessary parts in our just-in-time inventory or storage, we as a generation should hold our heads in shame and leaders accountable.
Open Source Ventilator Project
71–80 of 145 posts
Re: Open Source Ventilator Project
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But does it really matter ? Yes - I think we should challenge misleading information wherever we see it in this situation. Fighting panic is part of the problem and bad numbers cause panic. I mean, if we don't really care that the numbers aren't accurate because it's more important to emphasise why the project is important, we might as well go all the way and say 99% of people need a ventilator and really sell the…
I don't think this project wants to create panic. To me it rather is trying to help and be prepared. I'd rather have too many than too few. Plus, we don't know when the site was set up. Two weeks ago ? Four weeks ago ? Our collective knowlegde is changing every day. Could just be they have been busy and did not find the time to update it ? And finally, blueprint for a cheap OSS FEV will always be useful. COVID or not…
They’re not arguing against having an open source spec, they’re just pointing out that you can do the open source ventilator thing while not spreading misinformation.
Please don’t confuse the two. It’s hard enough to fight the misinformation as is without well-intentioned people such as yourself introducing red herrings.
Again, your point is coming from a good place. But we need to be really careful about not accepting misinformation.
Re: Open Source Ventilator Project
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just treat it as harmless hobbyism, which is what it is. When engineers are nervous, they build things. That is natural! Will these open source designs save many lives? I doubt it. Large scale manufacturers working with existing vent makers will do a much better job. But... if it gets thousands of people thinking about artificial ventilation, we might get a lot of interesting new ideas that we can use in the decades…
> Just treat it as harmless hobbyism Any other time, yes. In a time of widespread panic? Dangerous. People are going to try to build and use these at home in an act of desperation to "do something", and end up killing their loved ones.
The set of people capable of building one of these machines and incapable of evaluating the risks of doing so is nearly empty. I don't think that's a real significant concern, to the extent it is it can be adequately mitigated by slapping some warnings on the blueprints instead of asking people not to try and design things.
This effort may well save no one in this crisis. It could still benefit by making future ventilators cheaper, serving as prior art on bullshit patents that people try to get on basic components of a ventilator in the future, and so on. This will very likely allow the health care system to funnel money into more effective life saving efforts in the future.
Re: Open Source Ventilator Project
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still not thrilled because hospitals actively breed antibiotic resistant infections. They are a primary source. Keeping invasive equipment adequately sterile is hard to do, even in a hospital. It's just the nature of the beast. To be clear, I'm extremely not thrilled at the global acceptance that "we need a zillion ventilators" instead of "we need non invasive alternatives and we need to educate the world as to w…
Non-invasive alternatives to "breathing for someone whose lung function has fallen below life-sustaining levels" sounds like [deadly] bullshit. I'm not sure coughing in the shower is going to do it for someone about to die from hypoxemia?
With all the memes flying around, it is tough to sort out what is believable or not. But coughing is apparently part of recognized therapy for CF - see https://www.cff.org/Life-With-CF/Treatments-and-Therapies/Ai... - so if you have fluid in your lung from covid 19, perhaps airway clearance techniques could help?
Re: Open Source Ventilator Project
#75I made some remarks about ventilator alternatives here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22624959 To pull out some pertinent details: Ventilators for covid19 seem to be mostly for inflammation and fluid in the lungs (aka pneumonia), not lung or chest paralysis. If you need a ventilator due to inflammation or fluid build up, you can do other things to address those issues. If you are doing home care for serious lu…
Please don't be silly. You cannot physically cough hard enough with dropped O2 sats like that, and even strong healthy people will be unable to fully evacuate matter from lungs, especially biofilms. Next time you propose an alternative, provide actual data supporting it. As a test, start doing it at say peak of a 2200 meter mountain. (That would be 90% with no acclimation.) See how far you can go. Sleeping positions…
Reduced efficiency and inability to evacuate matter fully (which you claim) does not seem to make the method useless. Severity of the condition is likely a spectrum too.
Re: Open Source Ventilator Project
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-invasive alternatives to "breathing for someone whose lung function has fallen below life-sustaining levels" sounds like [deadly] bullshit. I'm not sure coughing in the shower is going to do it for someone about to die from hypoxemia?
With all the memes flying around, it is tough to sort out what is believable or not. But coughing is apparently part of recognized therapy for CF - see https://www.cff.org/Life-With-CF/Treatments-and-Therapies/Ai... - so if you have fluid in your lung from covid 19, perhaps airway clearance techniques could help?
A running joke in the CF community is "Excuse me. It's time to go beat my (spouse/child)."
Manually palpating the chest to loosen phlegm to help people with CF cough it up is also a standard treatment for the condition.
Re: Open Source Ventilator Project
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we know we're creating more artificial problems for ourselves! There was no actual food supply issue. But people have panicked due to unchecked bad information and now we do have a real food supply issue, at the very worst time to have one! Maybe if someone had said to people 'hang on that's not quite right there's plenty of food being supplied' we'd have one less problem.
I don't get this idea that "panic buying" is necessarily bad. We are moving goods from communal locations to people's homes. We aren't destroying goods. Once/if the virus does arrive in a large volume at the location we would greatly rather that people stayed at home and ate food they had stockpiled than that they then went to the grocery store. Dealing with shipping extra products now (while a very small fraction of…
Panic buying also usually implies long lines of people waiting in close proximity to each other leading to additional vectors of potential infection. So yeah, no.
Re: Open Source Ventilator Project
#78> 15-20% of infected people require hospitalization for respiratory problems This is wrong - it's 15-20% of identified , diagnosed and subsequently monitored infected people, isn't it? I thought there was a mass of unidentified infected people, and even basically diagnosed but told to just deal with it at home with no further contact as they're low risk and minimal symptoms, and (obviously) 0% of these groups are goi…
You're absolutely right. But does it really matter ? A lot more ventilator are going to be needed, not in % but in hard cold real absolute number. Isn't that more important ?
The Imperial study estimated a need for 100k ventilator intensive care beds at peak in the UK, currently there are 5k beds, and they’ve managed to find another 5k ventilators using spares and old models. The government is planning on using ventilator technicians (usually 1 per bed) to manage many beds, with newly trained junior staff managing each bed. So assuming no treatment breakthrough they will need something on the order of a ten fold increase in ventilators and a 20 fold increase in staff numbers, on current trajectories within a month or two, and with full suppression maybe in the Autumn.
Re: Open Source Ventilator Project
#79> 15-20% of infected people require hospitalization for respiratory problems This is wrong - it's 15-20% of identified , diagnosed and subsequently monitored infected people, isn't it? I thought there was a mass of unidentified infected people, and even basically diagnosed but told to just deal with it at home with no further contact as they're low risk and minimal symptoms, and (obviously) 0% of these groups are goi…
https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/25/new-data-from-china-butt...
> But on Tuesday, a World Health Organization expert suggested that does not appear to be the case. Bruce Aylward, who led an international mission to China to learn about the virus and China’s response, said the specialists did not see evidence that a large number of mild cases of the novel disease called Covid-19 are evading detection.
> “So I know everybody’s been out there saying, ‘Whoa, this thing is spreading everywhere and we just can’t see it, tip of the iceberg.’ But the data that we do have don’t support that,” Aylward said during a briefing for journalists at WHO’s Geneva headquarters.
Re: Open Source Ventilator Project
#80> 15-20% of infected people require hospitalization for respiratory problems This is wrong - it's 15-20% of identified , diagnosed and subsequently monitored infected people, isn't it? I thought there was a mass of unidentified infected people, and even basically diagnosed but told to just deal with it at home with no further contact as they're low risk and minimal symptoms, and (obviously) 0% of these groups are goi…
https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/25/new-data-from-china-butt... > But on Tuesday, a World Health Organization expert suggested that does not appear to be the case. Bruce Aylward, who led an international mission to China to learn about the virus and China’s response, said the specialists did not see evidence that a large number of mild cases of the novel disease called Covid-19 are evading detection. > “So I know eve…
Your own link says that this is a highly controversial point of view, not agreed with by other experts.