COVID Ventilators
Shortage
- 2010 survey reported U.S. hospitals had 62,188 full-featured mechanical ventilators on hand, but the numbers varied widely by state - [1]
- Doctors decide selection criteria for allocating limited medical equipment - [2]. Sadly - “This is a shift to caring for the population, where you look at the whole population of people who need care and make a determination about who is most likely to survive, and you provide care to them,” she said. “Those that have a less good chance of survival — but still have a chance — you do not provide care to them, which guarantees their death.”
- Most severe cases require ICU care, of which there are 200k beds in the USA.
- The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimates that 38 million Americans will need medical care for COVID-19, including as many as 9.6 million who will need to be hospitalized – about a third of whom might need ICU-level care. In a February presentation to the American Hospital Association, Lawler estimated that as many as 96 million Americans could be infected. - from 'https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2020/03/13/us-hospitals-overwhlemed-coronavirus-cases-result-in-too-few-beds/5002942002/'
See Also
Efforts
- 1 Million Ventilators - is this an open source project? https://helpwithcovid.com/projects/13-1-million-ventilators
- See other efforts at [3]
- Incentive challenge at Ennomotive - [4]
- Other efforts listed by Ennomotive - [5]
Suppliers
- Ventilator specialist Ventec. GM Collaborating with Ventec?
DARPA Request
From: Vandenbrande, Jan <jan.vandenbrande@darpa.mil> Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2020 8:31 PM To: Vandenbrande, Jan <jan.vandenbrande@darpa.mil> Subject: I may need your help to build ventilators
All,
As you are probably aware, the president of the US has initiated the Defense Production Act which gives priority to the production of equipment of national safety in response to the current corona virus pandemic. I have been tasked to understand what we can do to ramp up production of ventilators, leveraging additive manufacturing at scale and idle manufacturing plants. The US may need an additional 10,000-100,000 ventilators in a couple of weeks, though other predictions indicate we may need more (750,000).
I am still in the process of understanding what the bottlenecks are, but would like to initiate your thinking processes on what you could possible contribute after you familiarize yourself with ventilator design. Here is a UK link that gives some ideas of the specs: https://medium.com/frontier-technology-livestreaming/frontier-tech-4-covid-action-emerging-market-ventilation-systems-9c818cb46189
If you are already engaged in some way, let me know. Lots of efforts are underway, but they may not be enough. I am open to accelerating production of existing devices but also open to old designs/open source/off-the-shelf (e.g., Arduino, robot components) that we can build quickly. Demand will not be met with a single solution.
At this point this is just a heads up email. I hope to have more details in the next 24 hours after I talk to a couple OEMs. But if you have clever ideas, who I should talk to in your organization or others, let me know. Feel free to propagate this email.
Thanks,
BCC’ed to DARPA contractors on my programs, past collaborators and other clever people.
Jan Vandenbrande - Program Manager - DARPA Sciences Office - (571) 218 4553