All of Joel Chan's Comments + Replies

My understanding is that the treatment requires significant monitoring and skill; the ventilation is often invasive (they have to get the tube into your lung, rather than just into your mouth). But for a while people have been suggesting compartmentalizing the medical system further. If you just want someone to be a 'ventilator nurse', able to intubate a patient and then manage a ventilator for that patient, could you do that with a 30-day training program? Seems likely and worthwhile, but will require some sort of emergency legislation to authorize in most places, and some rapid development of curricula and testing. Similarly, expanding production runs into legal issues. You may have heard about the volunteers who 3D printed ICU valves; they asked the company for blueprints, and the company threatened to sue for the IP violation. You might also have heard about the patent troll who sued the makers of a COVID19 test for infringement; they dropped the case once it was public that the use was a COVID19 test. It seems like a potentially sensible government action here is to nationalize (or otherwise force licensing) of technology that's useful in a disaster, with the government paying for the IP after-the-fact based on actual usage out of the overall disaster response fund. But in general, our 'peacetime' standards for medical devices are very high. If you want to take your toaster factory (or w/e) and start spitting out ventilators instead, there's a lengthy approval process because this is complicated stuff with many ways things can go wrong. When the alternative is nothing, it's probably good to have rush jobs available, but there's nothing in place (that I'm aware of) to allow this sort of rapid ramping.