As the coronavirus spreads across theworld, hospitals, public health experts and hospital intensive care units arefaced with a huge challenge of catering to patients who require ventilators.
For the uninitiated, people who contract the COVID-19, tagged as dangerous viral pneumonia, need the help of bedsideventilators. According to Dr. William GrahamCarlos a pulmonary critical care specialist, at Indiana University School ofMedicine, ventilators ¡®supply higher levels of oxygen and also help push airinto the lungs to open them up.¡¯ Air is delivered through a tube in thepatient¡¯s windpipe into the lungs, mimicking the way we breathe naturally.
However, amid the pandemic and the rise in the number of COVID-19 patients, there¡¯s a global shortage of ventilators.? ?
To deal with the crisis,medical professionals have been sharing hacks to increase ventilatorcapacity to help multiple patients in this time of crisis.
A Twitter user named and rural physician Alan Drummondshared a post about a Canadian doctor named Dr Alain Gauthier, who rigged up aventilator with do-it-yourself mechanics to treat nine patients instead of one.
In the post, Drummond who is Dr Alain Gauthier¡¯s colleague wrote, ¡¯Soin ten minutes the evil genius who is one of our GP anaesthetists (with a PhDin diaphragmatic mechanics) increased our rural hospitals ventilator capacityfrom one to nine!!!¡¯
According to a Mail Online report, Dr Alain Gauthier, who isan anaesthetist at the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital in Ontario andholds a PhD in respiratory mechanics, got the idea after watching YouTubevideos created by two Detroit doctors in 2006.
To perform the task, patients have to be paired who havesimilar lung size and capacity. Then, multiple hoses are attached to the oneventilator so it is running at several times its normal power, reports MailOnline.
According to the Canadian Press, Dr Gauthier says the ideahas tried once before, for victims of the mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017.
Soon after Alan Drummond tweet went viral, people startedposting multiple examples of medical professional employing a similar hack withventilators. Even billionaire and founder of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk tooknoticed of the thread and lauded the professionals.
In another example, another Twitter user shared a video ofan emergency medicine physician who invented a way to connect four patients to asingle ventilator, a solution that could significantly help overburdenedhospitals.
Babock is now an emergency medicine physician at a hospitalin Detroit, Michigan and posted a YouTube video on March 14 describing thetechnique.
¡°Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, many healthcare providersare struggling with a situation where they may have more than one patientneeding ventilation and not enough ventilators to go around,¡± Babcock said inthe video.
¡°That¡¯s why I¡¯m putting this YouTube together. So I can showyou how to modify one ventilator to ventilate more than one patient.¡±
Another example shared by Twitter user is of a man named JohnStrupat?who a retired respiratory therapist in London who devised arespiratory for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In 2007, the agencywas looking for a life support device that could run on batteries and bedeployed cheaply and effectively.
According to CBC News, Strupatexplains that his device called the "pandemic ventilator" is ¡®astandard from the 1970s and requires a patient be intubated, the medical wordused to describe putting a tube through someone's mouth and into their airway.¡¯
According to the report, it also serves as a cheaperalternative ¡®a conventional ventilator found in a hospital costs about Rs 18,90,565 for one unit, his design would cost about Rs? 37,811 a unit and with a couple ofmodifications.¡¯
In a similar initiative,?group of volunteers in Italy 3D printed?100 expensive valves used for life-saving coronavirus treatments in a day after a hospital ran out of them.?
3D printing business?Isinnova reportedly lent a hand when the original supplier could not produce the valves quickly enough and managed to develop a prototype in three hours.??