A Canadian physician has shared a YouTube video, made by an American counterpart, showing how to turn a single-patient ventilator into a nine-person apparatus. Ontario doctor Alan Gauthier was inspired by a DIY instructional video, “COVID-19 How to Use One Ventilator to Save Multiple Lives,” made by Michigan doctor Charlene Babcock to do some jerry-rigging of his own.
Dr. Gauthier works at a rural hospital in Eastern Ontario, which only has nine ventilators for a population of 60,000 people in the region, per Toronto.com. While the hack, which involves extra tubing and valves, hasn’t been tested on humans yet, “at one point we may not have other options,” Gauthier told CBC News.
Having seen the impossible decisions made by Italian physicians to choose between patients from a large group in need of ventilators, Gauthier explained, “The option could be well, we let people die or we give that a chance.” After Gauthier’s colleague, emergency room physician Dr. Alan Drummond, posted photos of the contraption on Twitter on March 17, 2020, the idea garnered more than 75,000 likes, including from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Drummond noted, “In ten minutes the evil genius who is one of our GP anaesthetists (with a PhD in diaphragmatic mechanics) increased our rural hospitals ventilator capacity from one to nine!!!” This prompted many healthcare professionals to respond, both with enthusiastic praise and requests for more information, as well as some who were concerned about the sharing of a contaminated air supply among multiple patients.
Drummond pointed out that in the kind of emergency situation hospitals in Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States are already facing, the rewards will be greater than the risks. Radiologist and co-founder of the Coalition of Ontario Doctors, David Jacobs replied that “the caveats are: 1. Equal tube lengths. 2. Equal lung capacity. 3. Equal lung resistance. 4. Same infection. 6. Make sure your medical liability insurance is paid in full, check with an ICU doc.”
Elon Musk responded on Twitter, describing the conversation as “an interesting thread,” and adding, “A single computer, pump & pressure accumulator would be fine for many patients, but ideally individual valves per patient to personalize care & avoid cross-flow risk.” Musk further announced on Twitter, on Wednesday, March 25, that the shuttered Giga New York factory in Buffalo would reopen to produce ventilators.
The idea originated by Dr. Charlene Babcock’s video, posted just three days before, on March 14, 2020, where she showed other physicians how to hook up two to four patients to a single ventilator. As she explains, “because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many healthcare providers are struggling with a situation where they may have more than one patient needing ventilation and not enough ventilators to go around.”
Babcock and her colleague Dr. Greg Neyman co-authored a 2006 study on the subject with the idea of handling a “disaster surge” of patients, which was published in the journal of Academic Emergency Medicine. While the study was simulated, in her video, Babcock said that the technique had been used in a disaster situation—the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada, which injured 413 people and killed 59.
One of the attending physicians had trained with Greg Neyman and remembered the 2006 study. Babcock explained, “[W]hen the respiratory therapist came up to him and said, ‘We don’t have enough ventilators,’ he said, ‘ok, get a splitter, use one ventilator for two patients.’” They were thus able to sustain patients for hours as they waited for outside ventilator support to arrive.
Doctors and engineers around the world are working on various hacks and fixes to get maximum use out of the ventilators available, going so far as to produce 3-D-printed add-on parts. British inventor and CEO James Dyson said that the world-famous vacuum cleaner company in his namesake has invented and developed a new ventilator called the “CoVent,” 10,000 of which the company will manufacture for the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, per CNN. Dyson also plans to donate 5,000 units to hospitals around the world.
The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Party’s coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.
