What seems clear is that no sooner was
the war footing announced than was it put on ice. In the UK it was
cancelled within a month. In the U.S. FEMA was having doubts even before
NY governor Cuomo revealed the state had a stockpile.
March 15 – UK prime minister Boris Johnson calls on business to help tackle ventilator crisis (FT)
March 19 – Automakers Might Retool To Make Ventilators (NPR)
March 26 – After Considering $1 Billion Price Tag for Ventilators, White House Has Second Thoughts (NYT) Federal Emergency Management Agency said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive. That price tag was more than $1 billion, with several hundred million dollars to be paid upfront to General Motors to retool a car parts plant in Kokomo, Ind., where the ventilators would be made with Ventec’s technology… an initial promise that the joint venture could turn out 20,000 ventilators in short order had shrunk to 7,500, with even that number in doubt.
March 27 – Dyson to make 15,000 ventilators - said the company had designed and built an entirely new ventilator, called the “CoVent” (CNN)
March 28 – Gov. Cuomo on Ventilators in NYC: They Are In Stockpile (RealClearPolitics)
April 2 – 2,755 U.S. Factories Can Be Retooled to Fight Coronavirus (Barron’s)
April 4 – Ford and GM are undertaking a warlike effort to produce ventilators. … to retool their manufacturing to create components, Ford’s Price said.
April 8 – Billionaire Dyson’s 10,000 Ventilators Risk Missing Coronavirus ‘Peak Week’ In U.K. Hospitals (Forbes)
April 9 – USA Pays GM $490 Million For Ventilators (CleanTechnica)
April 10 – Ford, GM, and Tesla are making ventilators to fight Covid-19 (Vox)
April 16 – How GM and Ford switched out pickup trucks for breathing machines (Verge)
April 24 – Dyson Covid-19 ventilators are ‘no longer required’ (BBC)
April 24 – Dyson’s £20m ventilator ‘no longer required’ (Sky)
DO VENTILATORS KILL PEOPLE?
And while that was going on, doubts were growing whether ventilators help at all. Kit Knightley in Off-Guardian assembles a host of expert medical opinion that ventilators only made things worse. You can read it here: https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/06/covid19-are-ventilators-killing-people/ Following up articles like Die Welt's “Puzzling death rate among respiratory patients” he finds that in Covid-19 patients whose lung walls are thinning, ventilating them could be the worst thing to do. Ventilators may not be hurting just Covid patients but many patients, wherever ventilation is used not as emergency intervention but as a treatment.
SO DO VENTILATORS EVEN HELP?
Is ventilation as a treatment pseudo science in general? Of course there are cases where someone’s lungs are damaged beyond repair and ventilation is the only way to keep them alive – which is another way of saying they are going to die anyway.
The conclusion I felt the article was leading to, is that ventilators often kill patients, period: regardless of whether they have Covid or any other illness. Indeed “intubation” (a very silly word, likely a euphemism to avoid the verb ‘we ventilated him’) may actually be pseudo-science.
The article contains several pointers – that the benefits of ventilation have never been clinically proven, that ventilation causes lung injuries, that 58% of patients who’ve been ventilated who recover die within a year, thus the total failure rate from ventilation is even higher than 58% – but the conclusion never came.
It is reported that Medicare pays out $39,000 if a patient is described as having Covid, pneumonia and put on a ventilator – and only $4,700 without the ventilator. There is a clear financial bias at play. A dramatic reassessment of ventilation could be one of the few positives to come out of this whole fiasco. I fear “the money says, ‘no’.”
March 15 – UK prime minister Boris Johnson calls on business to help tackle ventilator crisis (FT)
March 19 – Automakers Might Retool To Make Ventilators (NPR)
March 26 – After Considering $1 Billion Price Tag for Ventilators, White House Has Second Thoughts (NYT) Federal Emergency Management Agency said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive. That price tag was more than $1 billion, with several hundred million dollars to be paid upfront to General Motors to retool a car parts plant in Kokomo, Ind., where the ventilators would be made with Ventec’s technology… an initial promise that the joint venture could turn out 20,000 ventilators in short order had shrunk to 7,500, with even that number in doubt.
March 27 – Dyson to make 15,000 ventilators - said the company had designed and built an entirely new ventilator, called the “CoVent” (CNN)
March 28 – Gov. Cuomo on Ventilators in NYC: They Are In Stockpile (RealClearPolitics)
April 2 – 2,755 U.S. Factories Can Be Retooled to Fight Coronavirus (Barron’s)
April 4 – Ford and GM are undertaking a warlike effort to produce ventilators. … to retool their manufacturing to create components, Ford’s Price said.
April 8 – Billionaire Dyson’s 10,000 Ventilators Risk Missing Coronavirus ‘Peak Week’ In U.K. Hospitals (Forbes)
April 9 – USA Pays GM $490 Million For Ventilators (CleanTechnica)
April 10 – Ford, GM, and Tesla are making ventilators to fight Covid-19 (Vox)
April 16 – How GM and Ford switched out pickup trucks for breathing machines (Verge)
April 24 – Dyson Covid-19 ventilators are ‘no longer required’ (BBC)
April 24 – Dyson’s £20m ventilator ‘no longer required’ (Sky)
DO VENTILATORS KILL PEOPLE?
And while that was going on, doubts were growing whether ventilators help at all. Kit Knightley in Off-Guardian assembles a host of expert medical opinion that ventilators only made things worse. You can read it here: https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/06/covid19-are-ventilators-killing-people/ Following up articles like Die Welt's “Puzzling death rate among respiratory patients” he finds that in Covid-19 patients whose lung walls are thinning, ventilating them could be the worst thing to do. Ventilators may not be hurting just Covid patients but many patients, wherever ventilation is used not as emergency intervention but as a treatment.
SO DO VENTILATORS EVEN HELP?
Is ventilation as a treatment pseudo science in general? Of course there are cases where someone’s lungs are damaged beyond repair and ventilation is the only way to keep them alive – which is another way of saying they are going to die anyway.
The conclusion I felt the article was leading to, is that ventilators often kill patients, period: regardless of whether they have Covid or any other illness. Indeed “intubation” (a very silly word, likely a euphemism to avoid the verb ‘we ventilated him’) may actually be pseudo-science.
The article contains several pointers – that the benefits of ventilation have never been clinically proven, that ventilation causes lung injuries, that 58% of patients who’ve been ventilated who recover die within a year, thus the total failure rate from ventilation is even higher than 58% – but the conclusion never came.
It is reported that Medicare pays out $39,000 if a patient is described as having Covid, pneumonia and put on a ventilator – and only $4,700 without the ventilator. There is a clear financial bias at play. A dramatic reassessment of ventilation could be one of the few positives to come out of this whole fiasco. I fear “the money says, ‘no’.”
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