The device he was referring to was a hand-driven bellows attached to a face mask, and he brought it up as a desperate, last-ditch scenario, ending his description of it with "No, thank you!" Though I think there's a good chance we'll end up there.

Those are a lot simpler and safer than a mechanical ventilator, which requires intubation or a tracheostomy, which you might say is highly invasive of the respiratory abstraction layer, and can cause correspondingly subtle and messy failures.