Re:Google promised its contact tracing app was completely pr...
by toast0 on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @12:58PM
(#26958540)
> Ventilators were the critical thing until we realized they were a very sub optimal treatment.
Ventilators and ICU beds are the shortages people are/were talking about, but the real issue is staff to operate the ventilators and care for the people in the ICU beds.
You can work to quickly manufacture more equipment and it was done, but training people to do ICU nursing isn't fast; especially when in-person learning is inadvisable. Even if you train up non-ICU nurses to do ICU nursing, you need to train replacements for what they were doing (or go without). We don't have a lot of spare nursing capacity, especially when there is near-worldwide excess demand.
Ventilators and ICU beds are the shortages people are/were talking about, but the real issue is staff to operate the ventilators and care for the people in the ICU beds.
You can work to quickly manufacture more equipment and it was done, but training people to do ICU nursing isn't fast; especially when in-person learning is inadvisable. Even if you train up non-ICU nurses to do ICU nursing, you need to train replacements for what they were doing (or go without). We don't have a lot of spare nursing capacity, especially when there is near-worldwide excess demand.