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From a biomechanical perspective I don’t think that sharing ventilators is possible at all. When two people are connected to one ventilator one person’s lungs will fill more easily and the most of tidal volume will go to that person and the second person will die. It will be even worse with four people. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Edit: Actually I’d like to be wrong about that.
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I think this is just a sign of how desperately the CDC is trying to find a way to get health tips out to the public. They know Trump is less likely to pull the plug if they can convince him it was his idea.
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You are not wrong. Patient selection is key. It has actually been used, in Las Vegas after the massacre there. Problem here is the patients may be well matched in size and severity initially, but likely will not stay that way. Both patients in the circuit see the same PIP, PEEP and total TV. The more compliant lungs get the lions share of the air. Keeping the compliance well matched is the only way to make this work. I see it as a stop gap at best, and more labor intensive, although probably less so than manual bagging would be!
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The tweet is misreporting the article. The new estimate is on the assumption that the UK is going to reproduce what was done in South Korea. This is far from certain.
The UK government is aiming to relax restrictions on people’s movements only when the country has the ability to test more people for the virus, said Ferguson. Some have criticised the UK for not following the advice of the World Health Organization to “test, test, test”. But Ferguson said community testing and contact tracing wasn’t included as a possible strategy in the original modelling because not enough tests were available.
He said the UK should have the testing capacity “within a few weeks” to copy what South Korea has done and aggressively test and trace the general population.
In fact the “business as usual” situation actually looks worse now than before:
New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said.
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https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Today is the day the US seemingly supassed China in the number of cumulative confirmed cases. China is almost certainly underreporting, but the US is certainly undertesting, so it’s impossible to say at this point who really is on top.
Does it matter? Not really, but the media will inevitably make a big deal about the numbers, and that will eat at Trump’s fragile ego.
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The NYT unintentionally summing up the underlying problem through the change of a single article’s abstract…
(For those who have trouble reading diffs, the original abstract was “A teenager in California who died from the coronavirus is one of the nation’s youngest victims.” The new abstract is “Stocks surged on the promise of a bailout as companies and workers tried to navigate the crisis.”)
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It goes beyond that as well. There is this “acelerationism” idea that has been circulating in far right and neo-nazi groups for some time, that they can bring about the world they want by acellerating the decline of current social structures. One of the reasons the FBI caught this guy is he was rushing to take advantage of the epidemic. Unfortunately, there has been an uptick, at least in plotting, in these groups at the moment.
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Maybe he’s plotting to use it as cover for a raid on the strategic maple syrup reserve.
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