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... ...
Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer
71–80 of 182 posts
Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer
#72"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…
Thanks, I'm interested too why people think car manufacturers are the best place to make ventilators. What are the difficult/bottleneck parts to build?
Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer
#73It would be nice if we could at least provide everybody with simple surgical masks. It would surely help flatten the curve a lot if we could make masks in public mandatory. As far as I understand it those are basically just paper and a nose clip. They should be very simple to mass manufacture.
Yes. Or things like oxygen. There are so much more things than ventilators that are much easier to scale.
Making oxygen is easy. I’m sure half the people on this site can fill a soda bottle with pure oxygen using a machine hacked together from just things found in an average kitchen.
Industrial scale production, transport, making sure it doesn’t set everything on fire, and supplying a medically appropriate quality without risking hyperoxia? That’s hard.
Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer
#74Some 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."
I’ve wondered about this for a little while. Why does Germany have five times as many ICU beds than England? Until now, I’ve never heard a suggestion that England had fewer ICU beds than it needed generally, and assuming England and Germany use beds at the same general capacity, why on earth is Germany running five times more beds that it generally needs? (please don’t answer “for a case like this” unless you have so…
Queuing Theory 101: you can either optimize for usage or for availability, not for both at the same time.
Investing in availability costs, and the UK has been brutally cutting NHS funding in the past years or even decades.
Another aspect is that health care in Germany is much more decentralized, and so local hospitals have to absorb spikes in demand more by themselves, distributing patients to other facilities is only done in very rare cases (usually when specialist treatment is necessary). You cannot operate at > 80% utilization and still be able to absorb spikes in demand.
Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main problem I see regarding masks is, besides price, distribution. Now that Chinese manufacturers are running again, they are producing 24/7. Sure prices are way higher than before. But the masks are there. Problem is, Chinese suppliers sell FOB, meaning export cleared delivered to a (air)port terminal in China. Customers in Germany want to buy DDP (import cleared and delivered a specified location in Germany).…
My concern is the rush to acquire PPE, rules be damned, a decent amount of counterfeit masks will make it into circulation, and will provide a false sense of security.
I bet someone could develop a simple mask test everyone could even do at home.
(Let’s present solutions, HN. Don’t just tell people things won’t work.)
Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing money or waivers cannot solve, as long as masks are being made and China allows export. I doubt Germany, USA, Italy etc care about chartering dozens of planes just for that.
I'm not so sure. We have an ongoing toilet paper crisis that is in it's third week now and the government is unable or unwilling to do anything about it, despite ensuring everyone that there's plenty of toilet paper somewhere in some storage of some company. If a somewhat trivial problem like coordinating a few trucks is beyond their ability, I have no hope for coordinating planes and import/export. You might say "bu…
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.
Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer
#77Some 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."
I’ve wondered about this for a little while. Why does Germany have five times as many ICU beds than England? Until now, I’ve never heard a suggestion that England had fewer ICU beds than it needed generally, and assuming England and Germany use beds at the same general capacity, why on earth is Germany running five times more beds that it generally needs? (please don’t answer “for a case like this” unless you have so…
One explenation I heard is that hospitals in Germany perform more surgeries than any other OECD country per 100k inhabitants [1]. Not sure if it actually explains difference in the number of ICU beds.
[1] https://www.gesundheitsstadt-berlin.de/oecd-studie-deutschla...
Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve wondered about this for a little while. Why does Germany have five times as many ICU beds than England? Until now, I’ve never heard a suggestion that England had fewer ICU beds than it needed generally, and assuming England and Germany use beds at the same general capacity, why on earth is Germany running five times more beds that it generally needs? (please don’t answer “for a case like this” unless you have so…
Note that the UK spends a lot less (per capita) on healthcare than Germany: (£2,989 vs £4,432 in 2017), and that funding for healthcare has generally be considered to be insufficient over at least the last 10 years in the UK, leading to cuts in service. This may account for at least some of the difference. Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Insufficient by what measure? You're comparing against - it appears - the second highest spender in the world.
There have been no cuts in NHS service. Sometimes I think I need to assign this to a keyboard macro because it's such a frequently repeated myth. The NHS has more funding now than it's ever had, it has been explicitly protected from budget reductions when every other government department has seen massive real cuts, and just last year has been given enormous spending boosts. NHS "cuts" are a bit like the gender pay gap - they exist only when statistics are abused to meet political and ideological agendas.
Or, you could equally ask why Germany and the USA seem to spend so much on healthcare. After all the UK spends about average for the OECD. And the USA spends the most of all by far so it should barely notice COVID-19 compared to other countries? I guess we'll see.
Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer
#79Some 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."
I’ve wondered about this for a little while. Why does Germany have five times as many ICU beds than England? Until now, I’ve never heard a suggestion that England had fewer ICU beds than it needed generally, and assuming England and Germany use beds at the same general capacity, why on earth is Germany running five times more beds that it generally needs? (please don’t answer “for a case like this” unless you have so…
Because the UK is _collapsing_ due to non productive rentier activity.
Re: Interview with German Ventilator Manufacturer
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that the UK spends a lot less (per capita) on healthcare than Germany: (£2,989 vs £4,432 in 2017), and that funding for healthcare has generally be considered to be insufficient over at least the last 10 years in the UK, leading to cuts in service. This may account for at least some of the difference. Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Insufficient by what measure? You're comparing against - it appears - the second highest spender in the world. There have been no cuts in NHS service. Sometimes I think I need to assign this to a keyboard macro because it's such a frequently repeated myth. The NHS has more funding now than it's ever had, it has been explicitly protected from budget reductions when every other government department has seen massive re…
I can't find stats to back this up either way; funding seems to have grown in real terms over time, but I can't see real funding per capita which is probably the more relevant factor.