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Israeli doctor in Italy: We no longer help those over 60
- 7373737373 7y agoHow come the industrial capacity of the world is not sufficient to produce enough equipment? Is it too specialized, too complex to be produced by commonplace manufacturing methods?
- onetimemanytime 7y agoNot enough in time, but even if you have 30k ones, you need trained staff. (I guess--not being a doc--a nurse with a few hours of training can do 95% of the job but still.)
- sharpneli 7y agoIt’s about ramping up the production. Given time we can produce ridiculous quantities per day if needed, but it takes time to set it up.
- econcon 7y agoIn my software or electronics I've designed, a lot of work has gone into making design temper proof, reverse engineering proof. So it's needlessly complex. Specially where we need to protect IP, for example using client and server side software when all the work can be done on client side because you fear your competitor will steal your secret sauce by reverse engineering your binary. I wonder how many such anti tamper efforts is used in these medical machine.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoI don't really understand this question. The industrial capacity of the world is not a single thing. Factories have specific tooling in place to make specific things. Even assuming the magic ability to re-tool instantly, raw materials occupy time and space and need to get to places. Even ignoring that, shutting down transport and logistics pipelines due to not wanting many workers to be congregated also slows everything down.
- eyegor 7y agoRight now I'd guess the bulk of the world's manufacturing capacity is under quarantine. Can't produce things without workers.
- agumonkey 7y agostock management issues, it's more a matter of being caught pants down by a problem growing faster than the machine can accelerate
- generatorguy 7y agoIn Canada the constraint is going to be the number of doctors that we have, not the number of ventilators or the physical space to house patients.
- op03 7y agoAs far as I understand (from random reading on the net) its more or less the same bunch of procedures for most patients. After a day or two everyone in the ICU probably knows what to do.
- johnchristopher 7y agoThat's a valid question, why the downvotes ? There's a marketing theater that says that anything is possible and that high tech is constantly mass produced.
- joubert 7y agohttps://www.snopes.com/fact-check/italy-elderly-coronavirus/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/italy-elderly-coronavirus/
- ma2rten 7y agoThis is from 16 March. The article was published today.
- joubert 7y agoTrue. I also googled to find corroborating reports but could not, so I remain skeptical of the characterization in the article.
- calebclark 7y agoThis doesn’t clarify whether the article is correct or not.
- tomerico 7y agoYes, this reek of fake news. If Doctor really had to make the tough choice of who to keep alive, it wouldn’t be just an age cutoff (and definitely not such a young age), but a spectrum of input, including life expectancy and quality of life expectancy for the patient.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoThere is an official directive to cut off the 80+ year old and people with a certain comorbidity index if... I guess they are unofficially doing it already and the cut-off age is based on realities. There is a thing called triage, doctors and humans practice in tough times. "The criteria for access to intensive therapy in cases of emergency must include age of less than 80 or a score on the Charlson comorbidity Index [which indicates how many other medical conditions the patient has] of less than 5." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/14/italians-80-will-left-die-country-overwhelmed-coronavirus/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/14/italians-80-will... Please note that is the richest area in Italy and hospitals are top notch. Just the volume...
- 7y ago
- pgtan 7y agoHow comes, the EU, this failed bureaucratic construction, is not helping Italy?
- masklinn 7y agoHealthcare is not part of the EU's powers. It has no mandate to get involved directly into the healthcare part of the response. The only things it can do is stuff like economic relief or loans or whatnot, which will be useful for the recovery but is not really useful for the crisis itself.
- raverbashing 7y agoGood thing the US government is at the forefront of the virus prevention and not the individual states.
- kasperni 7y agoBecause every country in the EU needs their own ventilators either now or within the next week or two.
- pgtan 7y agoSo, there are ventilators sitting around useless, because there may be needed "in a week or two" and the EU is not able to organize and coordinate the JIT dirstribution of the equipment across the countries?
- adrenalinelol 7y agoNot saying it ought not to be that way, but the EU isn't known for their bureaucratic efficiency.
- jacquesm 7y agoIt's the trolley problem, but now in real life. Also, you're not helping, you just use this crisis to further your own goals: to paint the EU in a negative light. And it's not like you weren't warned about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17266468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17266468 Flagging both your comments.
- aazaa 7y ago> Peleg said that, from what he sees and hears in the hospital, the instructions are not to offer access to artificial respiratory machines to patients over 60 as such machines are limited in number. In other words Peleg merely surmises what's going on, and has not received an order directly. I get that this is a rapidly-evolving situation, but this kind of claim should be corroborated by the reporter.
- raverbashing 7y agoThe article seems to apply to one hospital. Extrapolating that to the entire country seems an exaggeration at best. Though that being said, it seems that Italy still has a lot of pending cases still (that is, that have not been discharged or ended otherwise).
- elric 7y agoWould more inter-european coordination and solidarity make a difference here? Some countries are currently much better off than others (infection rate-wise). Are there good reasons for not taking in patients from different countries as long as capacity remains available? Not being able to do anything for (apparently) a large number of patients is a terrible situation.
- masklinn 7y ago> Are there good reasons for not taking in patients from different countries as long as capacity remains available? I don't know about Italy but I do know that german and swiss hospitals are taking in patients from Alsace (the easternmost tip of france) which is currently very hard hit.
- PappaPatat 7y agoWhere factually correct, the numbers are... smallish: "Two hospitals in Basel and one in Jura, in northwestern Switzerland, said they would each take two French patients after the Alsace authorities sent out a distress call for help. The French region has been particularly badly hit following contagion among a large church service last month. Hospitals in Germany are also providing help along with the Swiss hospitals that say they are providing help in the spirit of solidarity and international cooperation." Understandably so, since the rush is just hitting Switzerland itself. We're even preparing for a complete lockdown, I (this weekend) received an official document that allows me to travel between my home address and work.
- StreakyCobra 7y ago> We're even preparing for a complete lockdown, I (this weekend) received an official document that allows me to travel between my home address and work. Interesting, are you in Switzerland? After the press conference on Friday I thought the federal council does not want to go to the direction of complete lockdown because it would not be useful because it would not respected.
- knolax 7y agoI'll believe it when I hear it from an Italian source, in Italian. The information in this article presumably went through a linguistic game of telephone consisting of: Italian --> Hebrew --> English.