Since the spring, US medical device-makers have radically ramped up the country’s ventilator capacity by producing more than 200,000 critical care ventilators, with 155,000 of them going to the Strategic National Stockpile. “We’re now at a dangerous precipice,” said Dr Lewis Kaplan, president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. Many health care providers initially hesitated to use such interventions for fear the pressurized air would aerosolize the virus and endanger health care workers. Some of the earliest data about the perils of intubating coronavirus patients turned out to be incomplete and misleading. “Ventilators are important in critical care, but they don’t save people’s lives,” said Branson of the University of Cincinnati.

Source: bd News24 November 23, 2020 03:33 UTC