One of the biggest challenges in the fight against thedeadly novel coronavirus was hospitals struggling with the number of ventilators available. In Italy, which was one of the worst-hit countries, doctors had nochoice but to make difficult life-or-death decisions about who gets aventilator and who does not.
As hospitals around the world face a surge of patients withbreathing difficulties because of COVID-19, doctors and experts are beingforced to come up with quick and effective solutions.
In the beginning, Elon Musk seemed extremely nonchalant about the COVID-19outbreak. Once he called the coronavirus panic dumb, and even said that SpaceXemployees had higher chances of dying in a car crash than of COVID-19. He alsofaced flak for keeping his Tesla factories in Freemont, open with all theemployees, even after the lockdown.
Musk, however, quickly transitioned into being one of thekey players in ventilator production.
Musk had earlier announced that both of his firms - Teslaand SpaceX - would be working towards making ventilators or would donate to helpthe US government agencies procure them.
As per a report by the New York Times, there are about160,000 ventilators in the United States. Additionally, there are 12,700ventilators in the National Strategic Supply.
More recent reports paint an entirely different scenario. AFinancial Times report identified that these ventilators are not the sort which hospitals are in desperate need of.
The article argues? that Tesla had delivered ventilators used for people withsleep apnea instead of the invasive ventilators, needed for severely affected coronavirus patients.
New York City Hospitals shared an image on Twitter thankingMusk and Tesla for delivering 40 ventilators to Elmhurst Hospital in Queens,but the photo shows BiPAP machines that are traditionally used for patientswith sleep apnea.
BiPAP is an acronym for bilevel positive airway pressure.These and continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines are used to treatpatients with sleep apnea.
Whereas, Patients on ventilators are intubated, meaning a tube is threaded through the mouth and airway and the machine aids thecontraction and expansion action of lungs.?
According to an NPR report, BiPAP and CPAP machines have beenused to help patients with respiratory problems, but since mid-February theAmerican Society of Anesthesiologists has strongly discouraged their use intreating the coronavirus, saying the machines could pump the virus out ofsomeone¡¯s lungs and into the air
The tweet features a photo of the 40 ventilators Musk donated, still in boxes, labelled with ventilator company ResMed's logo.Those 40 devices represent a portion of the more than 1,000, that Musk purchased fromthe San Diego-based ventilator maker.
Critics on Twitter went against ?Musk for sending in sleep apnea machines.However, Tesla and SpaceX founder quickly defended himself after a supporternoted that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo confirmed the BiPAP machines could beconverted into the ventilators required to treat COVID-19 patients.
Musk said in a tweet on Thursday that 'all hospitals weregiven exact specifications' of the machines, and that 'all confirmed they wouldbe critical'.
He also tweeted that it was 'weird that so many troll/botaccounts were activated to attack on this fake issue'.
?According to FoxBusiness,? in New York City, the number of cases has reached more than 50,000.?New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, said in a?tweet, that the state?has released 600 ventilators to New York City, Westchester and Long Island, but the ventilator stockpile could be exhausted in six days.