91–100 of 164 posts
If some untested and unapproved method like this is used and something goes wrong, I would image that being a huge liability problem. Good on them for trying to save human lives, but our legal system does not always reward the ethical behavior.
There are some odd quotes and grammatical mistakes in this article. For example: “You wouldn’t want to put a patient with severe bronchospasm [sudden contractions of bronchial muscles in the lungs] with a patient that does not have bronchospasm because that would.” Likewise, one of the cited authors’ names, Babcock, is misspelled in the piece as Babcok. I’m not qualified to assess whether this risk is worth it but I…
Have governments made orders (legal or purchase) for manufacture of ventilators by large scale companies? Presumably ventilators are a relatively niche product - what's in them that the World's industrial complexes can't ramp up production of within a couple of weeks? I imagine it's the pumps that's the limiting factor? Given humanity already has the working tested, established designs. Can't governments requisition…
If some untested and unapproved method like this is used and something goes wrong, I would image that being a huge liability problem. Good on them for trying to save human lives, but our legal system does not always reward the ethical behavior.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that what these are? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVodALR3Zoo
No negative pressure ventilators are iron lung type devices. [0] What's in that video look like just oxygen hoods which surround the head in very high oxygen air. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_lung
I encourage anyone wanting to help to try and finds ways of manufacturing the essentials of PPE that we need to limit spread, as that will have a much bigger impact. Every hospital and clinic in my area is running out of masks (both N95 and surgical), gowns, plastic goggles and starting to get into issues with disinfectants. Having double ventilator use is a nightmare scenario for various reasons. There are much bett…
I thought I remembered reading somewhere recently that 2:1 is already in use in some cases (maybe in Italy?), but I can't find a source. Is there increased risk of ventilator failure with this approach? That seems like it could be an additional terrible factor to weigh, because parts have become so scarce.
Based on the specs, he estimates that a single ventilator could support up to 4 patients [0].
The bigger issue is the control system. Ideally, a ventilator will allow the patient to decide when to breath, and provide assistance; only forcing a breath when the patient fails to breath at all. WIth multiple patients, this is impossible, and you are forced to use continuous mandatory ventilation mode, where the ventilator cycles air pressure at a constant pattern regardless of what the patient is doing. Modern ventilators do not even support such a mode; although it can be emulated by programming the ventilator such that it would never detect a breath.
Another issue is doctor error. When programming a ventilator you can either program it in terms of air-flow or pressure. With multiple patients, programming in terms of air-flow is almost certainly wrong, and would cause a change in condition of one patient to negatively effect the treatment of all attached patients. This problem goes away with pressure based controls. However, if you have doctors who are used to using flow based controls, and are overworked, while using a novel treatment method, I would expect to see accidents where they either continue to use flow-based controls, or do switch to pressure based but are less effective at it due to it being yet another change from their normal practice.
Another downside is that all patients attached to the same ventilator need the same settings. You could potentially mitigate this cheaply by using analog pressure step-downs on the valves, but this just compounds the above problems, and introduces even more room untested elements to the equation.
[0] The exact number depends on how much airflow you want to provide. Apparently, in cases such as this, you actually want to provide relatively little airflow to avoid further damaging the lungs by over-inflating them.
There are some odd quotes and grammatical mistakes in this article. For example: “You wouldn’t want to put a patient with severe bronchospasm [sudden contractions of bronchial muscles in the lungs] with a patient that does not have bronchospasm because that would.” Likewise, one of the cited authors’ names, Babcock, is misspelled in the piece as Babcok. I’m not qualified to assess whether this risk is worth it but I…
It looks like they have since fixed the errors you mentioned, yet they still misspell the author’s name as “Babock.”