Low-cost portable ventilator (2010)
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
As an alternative to stockpiling, maybe someday it would be nice for the US to establish disaster relief factories, which have raw materials and rapid manufacturing equipment that can be used for a set of products, as needed. Create a set of product designs that share many of the same components and materials, but the products themselves differ in function and in the type of disaster they address. You could have a few teams of machinists and engineers who are paid to make and learn the designs for these disaster relief devices, which would require two weekends a month perhaps. When a disaster happens, you deploy them nearby and they produce the needed items.
Also, OMG:
"The farmer’s mother and brother took turns, squeezing the device 15 times a minute nonstop for 18 full days and nights, which kept him alive until a mechanical ventilator became available. Thirty days after being admitted to the hospital, the patient recovered enough to be weaned off the ventilator, and two weeks later he was sent home."
We will need equipment like this to save lives.
I suspect that the Seattle situation is about to go hot. People with symptoms are not being tested, so they’re not being confirmed. Meanwhile, domestic and international flights are still going in and out of SeaTac. People are unknowingly carrying the virus to all different areas of the country. This might explain why seemingly random cases are popping up in the Midwest, from people who have never been to China or Europe. Essentially, the virus is building steam, and the country is about to see a massive increase of sickness in the coming weeks ahead. And the old and less healthy people will get hit very badly. We all will.
Time to buckle up, and hunker down.
In New Zealand you generally can't due for punative damages and lawsuits for medical misadventure are few to non-existent then maybe, but I am sure red tape would still prevent it.
Maybe it could be sold as a non-medical device, call it a "Happy Fun Breathing Simulator" with no explicit purpose and people would stock up on then.
In this situation you're better off just building a lot more of these than you'd need and monitoring. Replace failed units.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fgfspi/im_a_cr...
The doctor says:
> Italy exceeded their critical care capacity days ago.
...
> This is the first time I have seen guidelines in a first world country suggest that older patients (who have survivable illness) are not considered for intubation and ventilation in order to allow capacity to treat younger patients.
It isn't clear that the situation got so bad that they actually needed to make these kinds of hard choices, but the thread links to a document with guidelines in case it's necessary. And apparently those guidelines do include considering age when choosing who not to treat, should such a situation arise.
From a machine translation (the original is Italian) posted further down in that same thread:
> Recommendations
> *3. It may be necessary to place an age limit on entry into TI. It is not a question of making choices merely of value, but to reserve resources that could be very scarce for those who are primarily more likely to survival and secondarily to those who can have more years of life saved, with a view to maximizing of benefits for most people.
Now I understand jerry rigging medical devices is not advisable. But a pandemic like this may get to the point where DIY solutions may offer the solution.
I heard from a general practitioner that mechanical ventilators also have fine pressure control. Which would make the whole system a lot more complex. So given that I figured the concept was to flawed. But the design by MIT doesn't have these fancy ventilator function either. So it seems a cheap, available, basic ventilator would still be valuable.