Ventilator supply is also very critically important!
While masks, gloves and even sanitizer shortages are in full bloom, along with drugs and Diet Coke, if we get into an extreme pandemic situation here, a vital machine that will be necessary to save lives may be in short supply and force life and death decisions, (death panels, anyone?) to be made as to who gets the ventilator and who doesn't.
I am not seeing much about the essential problem with this concerning preparation. If anyone has information, I would appreciate it. This is an older article about Avian Flu, but it makes a case for ventilators and their availability. If there is nothing ready to go as needed, then those in charge are certainly failing us big time. Their is no reason to believe that there won't be epidemics and pandemics in the future and act as if there is no need to be prepared, especially considering the potentially devastating impact. I mean, what in the hell? There is absolutely no credible excuse to be so unprepared, that is, if the safety of the population itself is any real concern. Maybe it really isn't?
Gee, I would think that would have some press as well as pressure to address the problem, as well as the many other things we might ASSUME will be available in a pandemic should we need them. Is there a problem with having stocks of absolute essentials ready to go in a wealthy country like this? Don't we have reserves for oil, etc., already? What good is that if you are deathly ill and can't be treated due to shortages? I thought we paid our taxes in order to ensure public safety, among other things?
This should be an outrage and totally unacceptable, i.e., to be treated as disposable pawns and mere fodder for disease or collateral damage and nothing more than a statistic.
Worth noting, the `severe' scenario presented - a 30% attack rate and a CFR of .5% - is nowhere near the severity seen in 1918 (CFR of 2%), and could potentially be dwarfed by an avian flu pandemic with even a higher attack or mortality rate.
Even so, their scenario finds without the unlikely rapid addition of 35,000 to 60,500 ventilators (and trained staff, oxygen, drugs, and electricity to run them), 200,000 to 300,000 Americans would die for the lack of ventilator resources.
And this opens up the thorny problem of who gets a ventilator, and for how long? When do you withdraw ventilator support from one patient in order to give it to another? Who makes these decisions? And how will the public react to the heartbreaking realities of triage during a pandemic?
https://afludiary.blogspot.com/2017/11/pandemic-realities-ventilator-shortages.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
remember, of course)
But I googled to see how many vents a typical hospital has, and of course it depends on the hospital’s location, but anyway, typically 12-72 vents.
So I’m picturing a hospital with, say, 40 vents available, then I’m picturing, say, 150 desperately ill people who can’t hardly breathe and...
