Rbbm. Snippets from lengthy article.
What is a ventilator? The 'critical resource' that is in short supply
'Updated March 25, 2020, 3:04 PM EDT
By Elizabeth Chuck
The coronavirus is straining the global health care system, and one piece of lifesaving medical equipment is in particularly scarce supply: mechanical ventilators.
A ventilator helps patients who cannot properly breathe on their own by pumping air into their lungs through a tube that has been inserted into their windpipes. Because COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus,
affects the respiratory system, the number of hospitalized patients in need of breathing assistance has exploded since the pandemic began.'
"This is a disease that people are dying of because of respiratory illness. They're not dying because their heart fails. They're not dying of shock," Rizzo said. "They're dying because they just can't get oxygen to their bloodstream, and that makes other organs fail, as well."
''Ventilators are hospital bedside machines that assist with two critical functions: getting enough oxygen into the bloodstream and clearing out carbon dioxide, which can build up when the patient is too weak or sick to move air in and out of the lungs. The decision to hook a patient up to one is made when it is clear that the lungs have become too inflamed or injured to do those functions on their own and when steps that are less invasive, like an oxygen mask placed over a person's nose and mouth, fail to deliver what the patient needs.
"Through different types of settings, we're able to sync up with how the patient is breathing and assist them with extra pressure, extra volume, extra flow using that mechanical ventilator," Singer said.
''The time a patient stays on a ventilator can vary from days to weeks, experts said. At the Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans,
coronavirus patients have typically been on ventilators for one or two weeks, said Dr. Joshua Denson, a pulmonary medicine and critical care physician.''
But it's late.
