#JOURNALISM: How Misinformation About the U.S. Needing ‘1 Million Ventilators’ Spread. “The error conflates the total number of ventilators required with the number of patients who may need the use of a ventilator over the course of the pandemic. How the error spread is a cautionary if convoluted tale.” The press has also done with ventilators what they accuse Trump of doing with chloroquine, turning a sometimes-useful treatment into a talisman. Only about 50% of patients on ventilators are surviving at best. And coronavirus aside, ventilators are dangerous: If you put a bunch of healthy people on ventilators for ten days, a nontrivial number would die. If you need a ventilator and don’t get one you will almost certainly die; if you need a ventilator and do get one, well, you might not die. Securing enough ventilators is part of dealing with this epidemic, but it’s not the only part, or even the most important part.
One has to have an intimate level of knowledge of physiology to manage a patient on a vent. You can’t teach the most Faithful Boy Scout to do it in less than years.
“Only about 50% of patients on ventilators are surviving at best.”
The worldwide average is about 30%. And those that do survive have permanent lung damage...often so severe they need O2 and machines the rest of their short days.
At best I would put them at priority #2 after masks.