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Comment by fma | Hacker News Reader

And the equipment...my understanding is that ventilators are critical for those who have severe cases. Can't just magically wish for tens of thousands of ventilators....

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In italy one and the only factory of ventilators which was selling worldwide 250 units per month is now producing 500-600 per month exclusively for the italian hospitals (and past orders not yet sent abroad were blocked bt the government and redirected to italian hospitals) for the next ten months.

https://youtu.be/7Iz5tWb9f8A [hoping the english subtitles work]

The translated subtitles seem reasonable. I had to go in and switch it to translating to English.

Most hospitalised people will only need non invasive respiratory support and surveillance. I guess these cases could be handled by purposely trained health workers.

Germany ordered 10k from Drägerwerk:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-draege...

If your country doesn't have a local manufacturer for these things, it seems you are kinda out of luck.

And Dräger already announced, that they going to extend their factory in Lübeck

But we can just build them. At least we could if we weren't instead shutting down our economies.

Look at the manufacturing ramp up that occurred during WWII for example.

Do you actually believe there is a ventilator factory somewhere that has been shutdown?

How difficult can it be to build one? Ok, we're not going to have one tomorrow. But how about in 3 months time? 6 months?

I worked for a ventilator startup for a few years, and it took us about 18 months to get our line to the point where we could make first articles built to manufacturing instead of prototype processes. These first articles then continued to develop some performance problems which needed to be rectified over the following year or so. This was starting from an empty building, which is where you'd be even if you retrofitted a ventilator factory into a car factory, because none of the tools in a car factory are precise or accurate enough to build or test a ventilator.

Yes but if you start with complete specs for a well-established production model, as well as complete specs for all the tooling and assembly machines you've got a completely different scenario. If you take experienced machinists off another line to spin it up with consulting from people who are currently building it, I would guess you could do something in six months or so. I mean, IBM built M1 Garands in WWII.

Yes that's be doing done now

"More than 60 manufacturers have been sent a blueprint for making up to 20,000 ventilators to treat coronavirus patients, “at speed”, as Boris Johnson called on British industry to help the government prepare for a surge in cases."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/16/vauxhall-ow...

I work for a very large global manufacturer w/ a presence in China, and does not produce medical equipment. My Chinese family told me (so take it w/ a grain of salt) they said 'Hey I heard your company is building ventilators to help out' and I said I don't know.

My gripe is why the other countries didn't do it too since we had more lead time. Infection rates are exponential...waiting too long to take action will cause more deaths.

A gun is very different from a medical device. The tolerances your automobile machinists are used to working at are much wider. Ventilators have to measure fractions of a cmH20 above ambient pressure, and they have to do so accurately to deliver gas, especially smaller boluses. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying that training someone who is used to the tools used to building automobile engines will be practically unskilled at building ventilators, and you need to validate your people as well as your production processes, irrespective of whether you have blueprints for equipment. You have to validate everything or you will kill people with these new ventilators.

This makes total sense. I appreciate an answer from from someone who knows what they're talking about!

During WW2, there were not a large supply of shut down weapon factories.

Car factories, for example, could be retrofitted to fabricate ventilators. It will not be easy, it will cost money and a relatively long time, but it will probably be easier than building totally new factories, and it will be more productive than reading tweets the whole day.

From my understanding, on Italy the mortality rate of those that are hospitalized is 25%, however the mortality rate of those that are put on invasive ventilation goes over 95% (can't find the source), so for most it's basically a death sentence.

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