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Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by chrisseaton on Thursday January 07, 2021 @09:40AM (#25671524)
I thought everyone decided we didn't need a vast number of ventilators like we thought we would? There was a huge panic for a week last March and a lot of random companies were going to be making them, then it just seemed to go away.

Does anyone know if we managed to ramp up normal production or there was some other reason it stopped being an issue? Or maybe the issue didn't go away just the media coverage and they're still trying to use ad-hoc ventilators?

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by pp-ir on Thursday January 07, 2021 @09:58AM (#25671760)
As far as I understood doctors, in march there was no guidelines for the disease. It was considered as a respiratory disease.

Later on, it was requalified as a vascular disease, scientists looked at cytokines / interleukin (I AM A ELECTRONIC ENGINEER, please correct me doctors).

Now, there is some systematic treatments earlier (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2770275), so yes, far fewer patients needs an invasive ventilator.

And that is great.

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by coding123 on Thursday January 07, 2021 @09:53AM (#25671686)
I've heard directly from doctors that the entire ventilator thing was a huge mistake and ended up causing more death. Treatment is now more focused on statins. The covid shell is basically in your blood clotting everything up - it's a huge ass fat cell that is killing people. Take aspirin.

Also help your immune system before and after you get covid by taking Vitamin D, E, K, A, C and Magnesium (helps with D intake issues).

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by SketchySeaBeast on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:27AM (#25672098)
I'd love some articles that back this up - I've seen low Vitamin D be mentioned as a comorbidity, but I don't think generic advice on vitamins and taking aspirin is that useful without any sort of evidence.
Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by coding123 on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:53AM (#25672393)
Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by VBprogrammer on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:58AM (#25672463)
While on the whole you are completely correct, it's worth remembering that the risks associated with taking recommend doses of vitamins are negligible.

The only plausible confounding factor is people behaving less responsibility in the belief that they are somehow safe. On a personal level, try not to do that.

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by SketchySeaBeast on Thursday January 07, 2021 @11:18AM (#25672841)
Yeah, vitamins I understand, but Aspirin has negative effects with constant long term use. I'm just not comfortable with those recommendations without any effort to support.
Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by coding123 on Thursday January 07, 2021 @11:15AM (#25672766)
This is great advice. If you have a chance to get the vaccine, that's the best option. But keep wearing masks, and try to not get the virus in any ways you can. Vitamins are basically boosting your immune system, and as a bonus there are studies that back up that it actually helps in some cases 77% better outcomes (potentially more). That doesn't mean you can't die from covid even if you're taking these vitamins (as well as with the vaccine).
Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by stolenmerch on Thursday January 07, 2021 @01:39PM (#25675251)
Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by jschwartzi on Thursday January 07, 2021 @09:48AM (#25671618)
GM contracted with one or more actual medical device companies to produce ventilators under the DPA. So yes we needed ventilators, but we produced a ton of them to fulfill that need.
Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by sokoloff on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:01AM (#25671799)
To be even-handed, both Ford and GM produced ventilators.
Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by djsumdog on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:07AM (#25671872)
The ventilators were a death sentence. Many of the people who died early on, died not due to COVID, but due to their lungs getting damaged by high pressure vents. Some were kept on high pressure for much longer than is normal.

There was a lot of bad advice coming from doctors in Europe, and also there was the idea if you had them on a vent, they were on a closed air system and couldn't spread COVID in the hospital. This was disastrous.

Doctors do not use them unless necessary today, but it's no doubt this is why many of the early death counts, especially among younger people, was so high in places with high vent use.

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by adolph on Thursday January 07, 2021 @01:06PM (#25674765)
Conclusions: The incidence of [ventilator-associated lower respiratory tract infections (VA-LRTI)] is significantly higher in patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection, as compared to patients with influenza pneumonia, or no viral infection after statistical adjustment, but residual confounding may still play a role in the effect estimates.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33388794/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=ventilator+covid19&fil...

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by corin_ on Thursday January 07, 2021 @11:07AM (#25672614)
Could you please share any sources? I know they're not used as much now but haven't seen any evidence that they are specifically to blame for deaths.

The majority conclusion I've seen in Europe about why earlier death rates were so high in some places was that the hospitals were overloaded and therefore didn't have enough capacity (staff, equipment, etc) and therefore some died due to there not being enough ventilators.

This isn't my field of expertise so I'm very open to finding out that my impression is wrong, but my gut feeling is that your comment is not accurate.

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by war1025 on Thursday January 07, 2021 @11:32AM (#25673150)
I don't have any sources at hand, but the explanation I heard is that ventilators are generally used for people who have healthy lung tissue but are unable to breathe properly.

Coronavirus weakens the lung tissue, but the ability to breathe (inhale / exhale) is unaffected.

Basically the body was forcing people to have shallow breath to preserve the damaged lung tissue and allow it to recover. The ventilator essentially restored their breathing back to full force, which turned people's lungs into soup basically.

Makes sense as an explanation to me, but like I said, I don't have any official sources for that.

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by saberdancer on Thursday January 07, 2021 @11:43AM (#25673313)
People are not put on ventilators for no reason. They are put because their oxygen level is so level that they will die if it deteriorates. People ended up on ventilators after they received maximum possible level of supplementary oxygen.

This explanation sounds very implausible and simplistic. When a person has extremely low oxygen level and you are giving them maximum oxygen possible, what can you do? Ventilator or ECMO (which is probably even more dangerous).

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by martinald on Friday January 08, 2021 @06:06AM (#25683489)
Not an expert, but as far as I understand with COVID people were not in major distress breathing even with very poor O sats, which is confusing.

The standard was to move people with terrible O2 sats at the start of the outbreak to ventilation immedatley, even if they did not seem to bad.

That seems to be replaced with providing high levels of O2/CPAP and only moving people to ventilation when that is not sufficient, even if O2 sats would normally indicate ventilation. This is why vent usage is a lot lower this second time round, even with more patients in hopsital.

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by saberdancer on Friday January 08, 2021 @09:03AM (#25684796)
I am not an expert either.

I would be surprised if they put someone on a ventilator just because his O2 level was low without first putting him on O2 and maxing out the flow. Little experience that I do have is that people are first put on O2, then if their saturation remains low they increase the flow until they can increase no more. At that moment they are a candidate for a ventilator.

Maybe they "relaxed" the criteria after a while if ventilators showed bad outcomes but when people are maxed out on O2, there is little you can do.

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by war1025 on Thursday January 07, 2021 @11:51AM (#25673464)
This [1] seems to be a fairly representative article of the sort of thing I've seen. Not peer reviewed, but it hardly seems like fringe lunacy.

[1] https://elemental.medium.com/how-one-covid-19-doctor-became-...

Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by tptacek on Thursday January 07, 2021 @11:55AM (#25673516)
Can you provide a source that wasn't written by a (checks notes) magician?
Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by war1025 on Thursday January 07, 2021 @12:06PM (#25673718)
I don't particularly care about the topic, so no.
Re:MakAir: Covid-19 ventilator with a Raspberry Pi by hkt on Thursday January 07, 2021 @11:03AM (#25672550)
Can you cite anything on this? I've heard it claimed before but haven't seen a primary source.