Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Cuomo says New York is experimenting with having two patients share one ventilator; Canada Says Ours Go Up To Nine, Eh?

First up, CBS News' Twitter feed:
While the Daily Mail reported:
Canadian doctor turns one ventilator into nine with some 'evil genius' DIY mechanics - winning fans, including Elon Musk
Dr Alain Gauthier, an anesthetist at the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital in Ontario, Canada rigged one of the ventilators
He learned how to do it by watching YouTube videos created by two Detroit doctors in 2006
Gauthier's colleague shared photos of the rigged ventilator on Twitter, jokingly calling him an 'evil genius'

The tweet has been liked more than 63,000 times and was commented on by many including billionaire Elon Musk

Hospitals are trying to figure out how to work around their shortages of medical equipment, such as ventilators
HT: FashionModelSecret (wut?)

And from FT Alphaville:

Could a bunch of internet denizens give us more ventilators?
In February 2007, Canadian biomedical engineering technologist Clarence Graansma set up a blog to document what he called the “Pandemic Ventilator Project”. The banner at the top described its purpose:
This blog documents our attempt to construct a ventilator design for use in a Flu Pandemic that can be made from readily available materials at the last minute. Hopefully, the situation never arrives where this device will need to be used for a pandemic. But just in case. 
Just in case.
Graansma, who was at that time working as a dialysis technologist at a hospital in Ontario, had recently been called into a meeting with the hospital’s infectious control team. They were concerned that the H5N1 avian flu that was at the time spreading across the globe could turn into a pandemic, and that the hospital’s supply of ventilators – which, like much of North America, were being used at about 90 per cent capacity – would not be nearly sufficient to deal with it.

Graansma, along with his 17-year-old son and a few others, began to work on building a few prototypes for machines that could be made quickly, cheaply and easily – or, to use the true tech-bro terminology, “hacked” – in the event of a pandemic. He also began getting in contact with government and media to try to raise awareness of this future potential problem, as well as writing posts on his blog. But no-one ended up paying too much attention....MUCH MORE
Just kidding about the FashionModelSecret HT.

It was actually News Alt Coins which triggered the thought cascade: alt coin—>ventilators—>Holy-crap-I-forgot-to-post-Ms. Kelly's-Alphaville-article.
Sorry Jemima, very nice piece.
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