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Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

No, the numbers are very bad.

There's approx. 860 acute and ICU beds empty (from the text chart) for Santa Clara County, which has about 3-4 million people. So that will be full in about 1-2 weeks.

In addition, the California emergency stockpiles were neglected, so all that material rotted.

But it gets worse.

We're in lockdown to "flatten the curve" on how many ventilators are needed. But it turns out 2/3 of corona ventilator patients die in 2-3 weeks, and the rest are too ill to leave the hospital.

So it calls into question why we are in lockdown if ventilators are in fact irrelevant. That needs to be re-evaluated from a public health policy.

It looks to me like corona should be treated like a regular flu, and the only lockdown should be for plane flights.

Ventilators Are No Panacea For Critically Ill COVID-19 Patients

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/02/8261052...

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Where I live (in RI) the lock down is to flatten the curve. Not simply to allow time to make ventilators. We are lacking ALL PPE. We’re also in the process of constructing field hospitals since We lack the hospital beds. Without PPE it will spread through our healthcare providers quicker and without hospital beds more people will die. Yeah ventilators would be nice too. But they’re not the main bottleneck.

That still means that (after a few grueling weeks) 1/3rd of the patients could survive. Moreover there's all the non-covid19 patients that could also survive if they wouldn't find the ICU fulls.

That's not irrelevant.

Btw, you're right that we're not capitalizing on the lockdown as much as we could: we're supposed to build out the testing, contract tracing and early detection infrastructure (temperature checks at every office and grocery shops... Italy just started)

Shutting down plane flights is actually not that useful: we should just do what South Korea is doing and test every single arrival, and then we could keep that infrastructure in place (obviously, if the number of flights make it untenable to test every arrival, that should be heavily capped)

No, 1/3 are not expected to survive.

If you read the article, they're expecting 90% to either die or have organ damage.

So out of 50 patients, they's expecting 2 patients to walk out of the hospital with some kind of normal life.

Ventlators don't appear to tbe the answer beyond, "Well, we tried to do something. Too bad they don't work."

The additional problem is that using ineffective ventilators kills your hospital staff for little gain. In SARs-1 (2002) in Toronto, more hospital staff got infected or died than in the general population. Hospital ventilation systems circulate airborne diseases.

Now that we have data that ventilators don't work, we need to look at what the next steps are. There's no point in destroying the economy waiting for ventilators when they're not a treatment for corona virus.

Your analysis that ventilators don't work may be valid. Your conclusion that therefor trying to flatten the curve is useless is dangerously invalid. Most people who come down with Covid-19 don't require ventilators. Flattening the curve buys time for all measures, including development of other treatment approaches.

Your comment repeats the common wisdom from 2 weeks ago, but does not apply today. It does not stand up to any scrutiny.

If you look at the time graph for available ventilators, we have more available now (435) then on March 30th (402)

Maybe regular flu should be treated with a little more respect also.

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