Posted on 03/27/2020 5:11:55 PM PDT by Meatspace
Re: “And presumably you have some data establishing the percentage of influenza patients who need ventilators, and how long they are on the ventilator before case resolution. Would you be so kind as to share a link with us?”
I can quote from memory - if you must have a CDC link, I’ll dig one out.
About 10% of hospital influenza admissions end up in the ICU.
I have no idea how many ICU influenza patients end up on a respirator.
The average hospital stay for an influenza patient who ends up in the ICU is eleven days - I have no idea how many of those days are on a respirator.
What I do know...
20,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations is 20X times smaller than 400,000 influenza hospitalizations.
Proportion of ICU Patients Requiring Ventilation
“FluSurge 2.0 assumes 50% of patients with seasonal influenza admitted to the ICU require ventilation (22). HSC assumes 50% throughout a pandemic (21), and HHS uses 50.4% for a moderate scenario and 50% for a severe scenario”
Proportion of Ventilated Patients Requiring 2 Weeks of Ventilation
“FluSurge 2.0 (22) assumes that ventilatory support of Influenza Like Illness patients lasts 10 days.
I think she belongs to Obama.
Why just GM? Why not Ford and other manufacturers who can make ventilators, masks, protective gear, etc.?
Actually - you’ve been acting like a total left-wing asshat lately...the panic mode must have shorted out a few synapses and separated you from reality.
One useful thing we can all do on FR is to dig out data and make it more available. That helps others since FR gets indexed by search engines fairly frequently.
The apparent need for large numbers of ventilators in areas where COVID-19 outbreaks occur, and the extent to which public health organizations seem concerned with the availability of ventilators suggests that either they are being used at a higher rate for COVID-19 patients, or the COVID-19 caseload is much more concentrated in time than for influenza outbreaks, or the public health people are incompetent. The latter seems unlikely as a first order explanation, since they are being guided by the same organization that published the paper you provided, and most of them participated in an August 2019 exercise related to pandemic preparedness.
The only data value which appears to be different between the influenza modeling and the reported COVID-19 data is the rate of hospitalizations relative to illnesses. But that data is of course very hard to know early in an epidemic. Some Chinese papers suggest a higher hospitalization ratio for COVID-19, which would if applied to the Huang models increase the ventilator usage substantially.
I cannot recall at what point you entered this conversation.
In any event, this whole issue started when I pointed out to someone that during New York City's peak influenza week, they had 4,000 influenza patients in the hospital, and NO ONE was panicking about enough ventilators.
Since NYC has 30,000 of the USA’s 120,000 COVID-19 infections, and since infections are surging ONLY in NYC, there should be no problem getting ventilators from the rest of the country to NYC, if, in fact, they actually need them.
Instead, Trump wants to build 100,000 new ventilators, which is absolutely crazy.
I haven't had time to dig into the math of how many ventilators are likely to be needed using the models you cited, and the previous modeling by CDC and the various state health departments.
I suspect President Trump with his natural political skills realizes that trying to explain to the public how allocation would really work is not likely to work, particularly given hostile governors and the press. A simpler solution is just flood the requesting states with more ventilators than they can possibly need, along with enough masks, gloves, etc. to bury Manhattan in them. (Of course innovative nurses and doctors are already inventing ways to safely conserve PPE).
Then, nobody can complain that President Trump didn't provide the equipment they needed. Since other countries will want them too, we can just sell or donate the extras or put them in storage for the future. Plus it gets some manufacturers back to work.
Trump is ordering the ventilators also to sell them to other countries such as the UK!!
Dyson vacuums is doing this also.
[I wonder if there will “Monday” ventilators? ]
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