Currently also at least the 3d prototyping facilities of automotive manufactures are being used for such purposes.
However, I really want to see those devices saving lives instead of generating news reports.
We already have shortages of intensive care in the grand est and in Italy. I don't think people there have the time to read tech reports and try out all the design.
This device doesn't have that problem. I can recognize most components as either off-the shelf or easily manufactured.
Very true, but USA, China, EU, Russia, India etc have their militaries ready to go with Plan A, B and C, they don't order bullets once invaded.
We all knew that pandemics are part of life, so we should have had warehouses full of this stuff. USA is spending about $700 BILLION a year in military matters and untold trillions in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, at least USA does not need an open source one, we can afford to pay whatever price they sell it for. They neglected this and of course now it's too late. 100K ventilators at, say,$25K each = $2,500,000,000 unless I made a mistake. What's $2.5 Billion to USA?
But actually pretty much all countries have stumbled into the same problem. A respiratory pandemic of this magnitude wasn't anticipated by anyone, for reasons that should be investigated further. Now it's very easy to say there should have been a bigger stockpile, but a lot of the voters, especially in the GOP are quite sensitive to government spending, especially for healthcare.
And it's important to remember that there are probably other things countries need stockpiles of, with a similar anticipated risk. For example dialysis machines for a kidney disease pandemic. These things add up quickly, and all you can do is make an educated guess of how far to anticipate any such threat.
For scale: Hospitals got some $100 BILLION from Congress for CoronaVirus.
Right, we had close calls in the near past, but why did they not spread like this one?
But you can't be lucky all the time.
This virus is extremely uncommon in that it is both severe, highly transmissible and a completely new type of virus.
I really don't think most people in developed countries would have agreed to spend a couple Billion Dollars to have reserves in the healthcare system, including ventilators, hospital beds and personnel, in order to prevent a problem a couple of magnitudes bigger than anticipated.
isn't the problem economy of scale? at peak, the US needs 25k-30k ventilators for a few days, and then 90 days later we don't need anywhere near that number. where do we store them? how do we justify the expense? etc.
especially if 70-80% of people who still get a ventilator die [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22730622
You either store a large surplus of them in warehouses, or ensure you can rapidly manufacture them even if the world around you goes to hell. That should be the responsibility of governments, and it's one of the main reasons to even have one - a government doesn't have to justify everything in terms of costs, it can evaluate some non-profit metrics like, I don't know, saving lives in case of emergency. Alas, something happened after the Cold War, all western nations went collectively insane, and got rid of most emergency surpluses and any kind of buffer in the system.
Those numbers are way off. NYC alone needs 30k machines.
Yes, the current federal mismanagement of the whole crisis is awful, but even if everyone had acted quickly, there would still be shortages. Covid spreads faster than device production.
With the supply chains broken, work could have started to bring up new domestic part manufacturers. If all medical device manufacturing was prioritized, lead times would probably shorten to weeks, not months. This is happening by industry already, but again the federal government's facilitator role could definitely speed it up.
Even in a crisis, there are business interests that need to be looked after. A company can't simply decide to stop making parts for its customers and shift to making medical device parts. It would probably soon run out of money and not be able to pay its workers. Here the federal government could eliminate business risk by giving out loans/grants for retooling and guaranteeing the purchase of parts that are made.
I point this out to suggest that your expectation might be a little unfair. If such an order had gone out one month ago it would have been controversial. But if you want to say that the administration is a month behind in their reactions it would be more fair.
You seem to have observed that a giant beauracracy is reacting weeks behind a crisis and this seems to upset you.
However 2 months ago this was the message from the White House: 'When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.'
That un-fucking-believable 'head in the sand' moment happened at peak infection in China; 80K people infected. This administration isn't a month behind; they simply don't deal with things unless they are forced to.
The US stockpiles ventilators for emergencies like this for a reason. Someone was asleep at the switch in our Federal Government and the reaction is to lie about how well they are doing and blame everyone else.
I'm fed up, aren't you?
I don't want to defend the current US political powers. I'm highly discouraged about a lot of things. But it doesn't help to make unfair accusations based on bad facts. If your criticisms are based on fiction they get tossed out.
Just rebase on truth and you might have some much more supportable criticism. There's plenty to legitimately criticize. When you drown out legitimate criticism with baseless criticism, the noise to signal suppresses real criticism. It is unclear whether this is intentional.
I disagree. Anyone paying attention knew, in the first weeks of January, that something very dangerous was happening. Moreover, we cannot equate the US government to a common person. They have the most expensive intelligence apparatus in the world. And we have an expensive government exactly to protect the population against real threats like this.
AOC is right, it's time to make stock trading flat-out illegal for members of congress. They hold index funds or nothing.
The current administration in the white house, however, is.
A lot of factors came together, hampering the response. Trump has fired lots of experts, many others left for other reasons and Trump has problems hiring Replacements. He disbanded that office in the White House. On top of that he didn't take the issue seriously at all.
I would say that in early January it wasn't yet clear this would become a serious respiratory pandemic. Maybe not even to US intelligence services or the Chinese government. But late January and early February it dawned on most people (including me).
> Three months ago there were rumors that there was something brewing in some part of China most people had never heard of.
Three months ago was January 30th. The number of cases on that date was 7,711 and the number had been increasing at roughly 50% every day for WEEKS at that point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019–20_coro...
"On 29 December 2019, a hospital in Wuhan admitted four individuals with pneumonia and recognized that all four had worked in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which sells live poultry, aquatic products, and several kinds of wild animals to the public."
http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e3c63ca9-dedb-4fb6-9...
Please please please don't make me defend people I don't want to defend.
I am going to edit the post to permanently enshrine my inability to do basic math. :)
Ventilators, generally, may be "well known", but the design and operation of a modern ventilator is probably not something that is "well known".
Doing this kind of stuff is much more complex than our ability to scramble. The key is to think about this kind of crap before it becomes necessary. Without that, we won't have what we need on time. Things like this are just not solvable by throwing money at it after the fact.
Will it ship Amazon Prime? No. But you'll be surprised how quickly people will deliver.