'All is well'. In Italy, triage and lies for virus patients | Hacker News Reader

'All is well'. In Italy, triage and lies for virus patients

reuters.com

36 pointspseudolus14 comments

Man, my heart breaks for Italy. (And the entire world.)

This is an unprecedented time, one we will all remember later. Hopefully, it's bringing the world closer together.

Ventilators alone won't help you also need trained medical staff to run them.

Italy will rush 10,000 student doctors into service, scrapping their final exams, in an effort to help the struggling health service cope with the coronavirus onslaught.

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

Bay has the smartest and most resourceful people in the world. Why can’t we utilize this talent to figure out how to build respirators. Sure there is a bunch of high end 3d printers in the area.

"Why can't we just 3D print them" is the most "Bay" response to this complex problem.

Snark aside, modern respirators are complex machines. Certain components could maybe be 3D printed. I suspect we'd probably just be moving the bottleneck up the supply chain, however.

Plans were posted last week on here. If it’s life or death triage choices made by a doctor, rudimentary machine could save lives.

We (at least, in the US) have a strategic reserve of functioning ventilators. What's going to be worse is lack of trained operators.

We'd hit the ventilator bottleneck even if not for them, but the operator bottleneck will come much sooner.

Do you know what is involved in operating one? Would it be possible to write documentation a layman could understand, so the "operator" problem is solved?

If I had the choice between no ventilator and one operated by a non-doctor just reading a manual I'd still take the second one.

Excellent question. Operator manuals for e.g. military vehicles (and weapons) are fairly step-by-step, though not necessarily idiot proof. I would how that a lot of us here could figure out the basics on our own, and with a manual be up to speed in a few hours if it really came to that.

while i don't doubt Bay has very talented people, and is surely one of the richest and most resourceful place in the world, it is very narrow viewed to think that this crisis will be solved by "smart people".

I'm not Italian, but I could understand that some people might find offensive to imply that Northern Italy (with one of the bests healthcare system) are less smart and resourceful than Bay people.

Ignoring the SV elitism for now, probably because by the time you need a respirator you also need a team of highly trained doctors to keep you alive and you can't 3D print doctors.

Exactly. I'm imagining a modern-day version of the scene in Apollo 13 where they have to find a way to fit a "Square Peg in a Round Hole"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry55--J4_VQ

Sure?

Isn’t “building respirators” a known issue ? we have to increase capacity and build more

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